California’s Deadliest Avalanche Turned on One Choice

On the morning of the deadliest avalanche in California’s modern history, Cody Townsend was skiing above the west shore of Lake Tahoe. People like him, who live for untracked expanses of wilderness snow, had found little to celebrate this season. Across much of the American West, the temperatures had been high, and the hills bare and brown. According to the Central Sierra Snow Lab, operating from a cabin nearby, accumulation had been running seven feet below normal.

But now snow was dumping. Dry, light flakes swirled around him, and with every turn, Townsend disappeared into great clouds of powder. It was the storm of the year in the Sierras, he would write that day. Yet something felt off. The wind was picking up. The temperature seemed odd. Townsend is a professional backcountry skier who learned the sport around Tahoe, and “it was just the consistency of the snowfall, the way that the flakes were coming down, the winds that were coming through, that had just something different, something I wasn’t used to,” he told me. He and his wife, Elyse Saugstad, a professional freeskier who had survived a 2012 avalanche that left three others in her group dead, decided to bail.

When he got home, Townsend posted on Instagram, warning his followers to be wary: “It’s fun out there for sure but definitely not time for full-send mode.” The light powder was piling up on a crust that had melted and refrozen, creating slabs of unstable snow.

In his comments, someone shared the news: “There was already a slide at Castle Peak.”

That morning, elsewhere around Lake Tahoe, a group of 15 skiers ventured out into the storm from the Frog Lake Backcountry Huts, a cluster of coveted off-the-grid cabins, where they had stayed for the past two nights. The group included several women who were close friends and relatives—accomplished working mothers, many of whom lived in the Bay Area and whose kids attended a Tahoe ski school—and was led by four guides employed by a local company, Blackbird Mountain Guides.

The group was there to ski far from chairlifts and groomed runs, to trek uphill aided by grips on the bottom of skis and glide down untracked bowls. The huts, set on the lakeshore at 7,600 feet amid red fir and Jeffrey pine, opened in 2022 and quickly became regarded as a jewel of the country’s network of wilderness cabins. The huts are rustic but, in some ways, luxurious: They come with access to hot water, leather couches, a roaring fireplace, and a pair of North Face slippers; booking them can cost more than $1,000 for a multiday trip. Some trips include chefs to prepare meals in the commercial-grade kitchen. When reservations become available, they normally book within minutes.

This group was scheduled to return home that day, and despite the storm, the skiers set off along a route of more than three miles that begins with a climb, proceeds through a gap in the mountains, and runs along a forested ridge. They had gone less than a mile when someone shouted, “Avalanche,” a local sheriff’s deputy would later report. Then a slab of snow about the length of a football field crashed down onto them, catching all but two of the skiers. Ultimately, only six of the group would survive.

Two weeks after this tragedy, the guides’ decisions—to ski through a blizzard; to travel a risky route—remain the mystery at its center, as law enforcement and the wider community look for answers. The Nevada County sheriff’s office and California’s workplace-safety agency are investigating potential safety violations or criminal negligence by Blackbird. Zeb Blais, the owner of Blackbird, has offered condolences in a statement, but he has not otherwise spoken publicly. (His company referred questions to a public-relations firm that did not respond to requests for comment.) Blais himself has skied and guided in Alaska and Antarctica, Japan and the Himalayas; in a podcast a couple of years ago, while describing how guides monitor avalanche conditions, he allowed that “there’s just a certain degree of uncertainty that we just can’t eliminate.”

The Frog Lake huts would have been a good place to ride out a storm. The guides and avalanche experts I talked with wondered why the group ventured out in such conditions, but even more so how they chose their path home. “The question is: Why did they go into the terrain that they went to?” Townsend told me. “What led them to believe their way out was the correct way out that day? It was an obvious mistake.”

From the beginning of the trip, the Sierra Avalanche Center, a nonprofit that works with a local Forest Service field office, had been warning about worsening avalanche danger, including near the Frog Lake huts. On the morning of the slide, the center put the avalanche danger at “high”—the fourth of five threat levels. “Travel in, near, or below avalanche terrain is not recommended today,” read the report issued at 6:29 a.m. that day.

The unusually warm conditions in the weeks before had melted some snow, even at high altitudes. A dry stretch had created a layer of weak, sugary grains, and the incoming storm had buried that in feet of heavy snow. The center’s observers had skied out to this area the day before the avalanche and witnessed widespread cracks and areas of unstable snow.

David Reichel, the center’s executive director, described the movement of such snow layers to me like sliding apart an Oreo cookie. A slab avalanche sends the top part of the cookie, the upper layer of snow, sliding over a weaker layer below, the cookie’s soft middle frosting. “This weak layer is expected to reach the point of failure today in some areas,” the center warned in its report.

On a backcountry trip, ski guides typically meet in the morning and evening to discuss conditions and plan routes. They closely follow these avalanche warnings. They know which parts of their route have avalanche risks and where runout zones exist for sliding snow. On the morning that the group at the Frog Lake huts was set to leave, the four guides had multiple ways out to choose from, including routes to the southeast that would have avoided exposure to avalanche risk, Dave Miller, a backcountry ski guide and avalanche instructor with 25 years of experience, told me. “Our standard is we don’t go in or under avalanche terrain when the level is high,” said Miller, who owns International Alpine Guides, which has operated in the Tahoe area for decades.

The solar-powered huts do have an internet connection, but it’s generally not accessible to guests. When Dustin Weatherford worked there for two winters, as the huts’ first caretaker, he printed out the avalanche and weather reports for guests each morning. He kept a couple of weeks’ worth of food in case anyone needed to extend their stay. “We were always, always ready, willing, and welcome to anybody staying if they weren’t feeling safe,” he told me. “Even if there isn’t avalanche danger, and someone just feels scared or they want to rest their hurting ankle, we’ll find them a place to sleep.” (The Truckee Donner Land Trust, which owns and operates the huts, does not charge for extra time in such a circumstance.)

The guides knew that the risks to the group were rising: They nixed part of the morning’s plan, and told the group they needed to head home, two of the trip’s survivors told The New York Times. The day of the avalanche, the four guides reportedly met without their clients to choose their route out.

Other guides told me that Blackbird had skilled employees and a good reputation for safety. Regardless of conditions, guides often choose the routes, Brennan Lagasse, a Tahoe ski guide who has led trips to the huts, told me. “Most clients are hiring guides to make those decisions for them,” he said. The four on this trip had varying degrees of experience. One of them was certified by the American Mountain Guides Association to guide people on splitboards—snowboards that split into skis for trekking uphill. Two others were apprentice ski guides, earlier in a training process that can take years; the last, the only one to survive the day, was an “assistant” ski guide, one notch below certified in the AMGA accreditation process.

Blackbird said in a statement that its senior guides communicate remotely with those leading trips to discuss routes and conditions. A former Blackbird guide, who requested anonymity owing to the sensitivity of the situation, told me that, typically, senior guides would have participated in a morning meeting with the on-site guides before the groups left the hut, and surely that happened the morning of the avalanche. But exactly how much discussion the guides and leadership had over routes is unclear. The surviving guide may be the only one who knows why, exactly, the group chose the route it did. He did not respond to my attempts to reach him.

When it left the huts that morning, the group started with a deviation from the typical path: It wrapped around Perry’s Peak from the north, rather than passing through Frog Lake Notch, an area with avalanche hazards. It was one of the shorter routes out and, the Times reported, the one that would put the skiers closest to their cars. But it still included stretches of avalanche terrain that are marked on the cellphone apps that skiing guides regularly consult, Miller said.

The guides would have known their choice carried real risk, especially under the conditions they faced—or they should have known. Snow was piling up that morning at four inches an hour—twice the rate that experts view as a threshold for increased avalanche danger. Because those first minutes after an avalanche are so crucial, guides will often consider, too, the added risk of venturing out in storm conditions that would make helicopter access impossible. “You’re generally going to take a lot less risk,” Miller said, “when the weather is bad and you’re not going to get a quick rescue.”

The 911 call came in at 11:30 a.m. on February 17. The Nevada County sheriff’s office started marshaling dozens of rescuers, many of them volunteers, from across multiple counties. They’d be split into two teams and sent in via different routes in motorized snowcats—a sort of truck on tracks—and on skis. By that time, wind-whipped snow was making it nearly impossible to see, and authorities had closed down Interstate 80, the highway that runs over the mountain pass. “We didn’t know what they were going to run into on their way in,” Lieutenant Dennis Haack, the incident commander throughout the recovery process, told me.

Authorities did know, from the satellite messages that were coming through, that several people had survived the crush. Some had stayed clear enough of the slide that they’d been able to dig out others in the group. “Knowing that we had six subjects who were alive in there, we were willing to risk a little bit more,” Haack said. But going in would be dangerous because of the treacherous weather and the risk of another avalanche. The authorities kept extra rescuers on hand in case they faced an “incident within an incident,” Haack said.

Blais, Blackbird’s owner, along with another employee of the company, headed out with skiers from the Tahoe Nordic Search & Rescue group, despite being advised against it by authorities, according to a spokesperson for the Nevada County sheriff’s office. To reach the avalanche site, the rescuers fought through whiteout conditions. The snowcats reached the Frog Lake huts, where they had to stop. Beyond that point, the slope got steeper. Only the rescue skiers could get there.

That rescuers were able to reach the area safely suggests to other guides that the backcountry skiers had strayed from a less dangerous path. If they had stayed across a creek north of what’s known in summer as the Red Dot trail, they’d have been in safer territory. “As to how or why they deviated only slightly—only 50 to 100 yards off of that route—and put themselves into that spot, is a big question that I think all of us would like to know,” the former Blackbird guide said.

When the rescuers found the survivors, six hours after the initial call, two survivors had injuries. But all six were able to move under their own power back to the huts, where snowcats had parked to drive them out. The nine dead skiers remained on the mountain that night.

Over the next days, snow kept falling. One hallmark of our warming climate is the whiplash from periods of extended drought to extreme precipitation. The Central Sierra Snow Lab would record more than nine feet of snow in 120 hours—the most to accumulate in any five-day period since April 1982, and the third-highest total since 1971, according to its director, Andrew Schwartz.

For two days, the authorities waited for a window in the weather to recover the dead. Eight of the nine had been found in the initial search, and their locations had been marked with poles. By 11:30 a.m. on the following Friday, Chad Weiland, a flight paramedic with Care Flight and a ski patrolman at Sugar Bowl Resort, was heading towards the site in a helicopter with two others.

Weiland circled Perry’s Peak four or five times, trying to see if rescue teams could go in safely to recover the bodies. On the north-facing slope where the avalanche occurred, he saw large banks of snow piled up by the winds. “The avalanche path looked heavily loaded,” he told me. It was still dangerous.

Using the traditional option for dislodging potential avalanches—explosives—would be difficult, given the timing and the aircrafts the sheriff’s office had available. But the night before, at a high-school basketball game, a utility worker with Pacific Gas and Electric Company happened to tell a local sheriff’s deputy about an unusual method of dealing with risky slopes. Three years earlier, the company needed to rescue employees and their families who were snowed in at a power plant, and approval for explosives was taking too long. So PG&E had tried dumping water on the slope using a firefighting bucket, Pete Anderson, the senior manager of helicopter operations, told me. It had worked well, and they kept doing it.

By Friday morning, Anderson was on the phone explaining the technique to Haack; a few hours later, one of the company’s UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters was dangling a 660-gallon bucket full of water from a nearby lake and dumping it on the avalanche slope. The helicopter made seven drops, until the water in the bucket started freezing. Then it dragged the bucket through the slope, like a wrecking ball. “That was pretty effective too,” Anderson told me.

That day, rescue workers found the last missing skier. They had all been buried within a 20-by-20-foot area near the toe of the avalanche debris, under as much as eight feet of snow. A lingering question is why the group was clustered together if the guides knew the group was traveling below avalanche terrain. Standard backcountry protocol is to expose only one person at a time if traveling through an avalanche path.

When the area was finally safe, helicopters from the California Highway Patrol and the California Army National Guard hoisted the dead skiers’ bodies from the slope and airlifted them back to the huts, where they were driven out by snowcats. Rescuers worked at this over the next two days, until the last person was recovered.

The community of skiers and guides in the cozy mountain towns ringing Lake Tahoe is close-knit. Many of the people who participated in the five-day rescue and recovery effort knew people caught under the snow or were friends of friends. One volunteer with Tahoe Nordic Search & Rescue lost a spouse in the slide. A Blackbird guide lost his brother.

This community thrives on skiing, reveres skiing, even with the dangers of mountain life. In Truckee, the closest town to the avalanche site, neighbors and loved ones have written messages at a memorial to the skiers—nine light-blue hearts on wood posts in front of an eagle statue. “You’ll shred with me forever buddy,” someone wrote to Andrew Alissandratos, a 34-year-old guide from Nevada.

One day after the last bodies were recovered, dozens of people in hats and parkas crowded together at the vigil for a moment of silence and to pay their respects. “Why do we do this? Why do we put ourselves in harm’s way?” Kyle Konrad, a bearded backcountry skier, asked as he held a candle. “It comes from a place of love and joy.”

Peter Atkin, whose wife, Carrie, died in the avalanche, said something similar in a statement: “Some of our most precious family memories were built at the Frog Lake Huts.” Carrie was a leadership coach and mother of two; their family lived in the Tahoe area and had been to the cabins many times. Her husband described the huts as “a place where she felt truly at home.” The people who live here, who love these mountains, know even small mistakes can be unforgiving. And they know why people take those risks anyway.