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Nevada County Sheriff Shannan Moon speaks about the tragedy . | Credit: Tran Nguyen \/ AP Photo<\/p>\n
What happened<\/p>\n
Eight people were killed in an avalanche near Lake Tahoe on Tuesday and one person is missing and presumed dead, California authorities said Wednesday. The other six people on the three-day backcountry skiing trek in the Sierra Nevada mountains were rescued alive, including one of the four guides. The avalanche, near Castle Peak, was the deadliest in modern California history and the worst in the U.S. since 11 climbers were killed on Washington\u2019s Mount Rainier in 1981.<\/p>\n
Who said what<\/p>\n
The backcountry expedition set out Sunday morning, shortly after the Sierra Avalanche Center issued an avalanche watch for the area, indicating that large avalanches were likely in the following 24 to 48 hours. The skiers were heading back to the trailhead after two nights at the remote Frog Lake huts when \u201csomeone saw the avalanche, yelled \u2018Avalanche!\u2019 and it overtook them rather quickly,\u201d Capt. Russell Greene of the Nevada County Sheriff\u2019s Office said at a news conference Wednesday. <\/p>\n
After the avalanche hit, the \u201csix survivors were able to use a combination of emergency beacons and iPhone SOS functions to contact rescuers, who braved treacherous conditions to reach them,\u201d said The New York Times<\/a>. The \u201cdangerous, hourslong rescue effort\u201d was \u201champered by whiteout conditions and strong winds from the winter storm<\/a> roaring through\u201d the Donner Summit area, said CNN<\/a>. Rescuers reached the survivors just before sunset. They were unable to remove the bodies of the eight dead skiers due to the \u201creally horrific conditions,\u201d said Nevada County Sheriff Shannan Moon. <\/p>\n An average of 27 people a year have died<\/a> in U.S. avalanches in the past decade, according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center<\/a>. Tuesday\u2019s tragedy was the second fatal avalanche near Castle Peak this year, after a snowmobiler was killed about a mile away in January.<\/p>\n What next?<\/p>\n \u201cAs families grieve and crews come up with a plan to remove the bodies from the mountain when it\u2019s safe,\u201d USA Today<\/a> said, the company that led the expedition, Blackbird Mountain Guides, \u201cis facing a tough question: Given the known dangers, why did they still go?\u201d It is \u201cunclear if the guides would have known\u201d that the avalanche watch was elevated to a more imminent warning Tuesday morning, said The Associated Press<\/a>, but Moon \u201csaid investigators would look into the decision to proceed with the trip<\/a> on Sunday despite the forecast.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Nevada…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":184872,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[23797,7,9,8,86282,86770,871,87247,87246,86845,86283,10608],"class_list":{"0":"post-184871","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-avalanche","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-california-headlines","11":"tag-california-news","12":"tag-castle-peak","13":"tag-colorado-avalanche-information-center","14":"tag-lake-tahoe","15":"tag-nevada-county-sheriffs-office","16":"tag-presumed-dead","17":"tag-shannan-moon","18":"tag-sierra-avalanche-center","19":"tag-sierra-nevada-mountains"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}