on Tuesday<\/a> during a three-day backcountry trip organized by Blackbird Mountain Guides.<\/p>\nIt was \u200cthe deadliest avalanche in 45 \u200cyears.<\/p>\n
The group of 15 skiers, including four guides from Blackbird, was heading back to a trailhead in heavy snow after a \u2060three-day excursion when the avalanche struck. Three of the guides were among those killed.<\/p>\n
Six survivors were \u2060rescued in the rugged Castle Peak area near Truckee, California, about 10 miles northwest of Lake Tahoe.<\/p>\n
Blackbird, which was founded in 2020 and provides guided ski trips, Alpine climbing trips and avalanche education, did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.<\/p>\n
In a late Wednesday written statement, Zeb Blais, the founder of Blackbird, mourned the loss of life. He said all the guides on the trip were highly trained in backcountry skiing, and each guide was also an instructor with the American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education, based in Colorado.<\/p>\n
“There is still a \u200clot we’re learning about what happened,” Blais wrote. “It’s too soon to draw conclusions, but investigations are underway.”<\/p>\n
He added: “We \u200bask that people following this tragedy refrain from speculating. We don’t have all the answers yet, and it may be some time before we do.”<\/p>\n
Ahead of the incident, avalanche centers had warned of particularly dangerous conditions following a massive winter storm that dumped huge amounts of snow on mountains that had seen scant snowpack in the months prior. Experts warned the weak bed of old snow would be unlikely to withstand the pressure of having a heavy, dense layer of new snow suddenly on top of it, leading to high avalanche risk.<\/p>\n
Expert urges caution<\/p>\n
The Blackbird tour group, which included nine women and six men, had been staying at the Frog Lake Backcountry Huts near Donner Summit northwest of Truckee, at about \u200b7,500 feet elevation. In addition to California, Blackbird runs backcountry tours in Washington state and British Columbia, among other ski destinations.<\/p>\n
Frank Carus, the director of the Bridger-Teton National Forest Avalanche Center \u200cin Wyoming and \u200ca one-time backcountry ski guide, \u2060urged people to wait for the results of the investigation before drawing conclusions on who may be to blame, if anyone.<\/p>\n
“The main thing here is not to rush to judgment,” said Carus, who has investigated deadly avalanches in the past and said such investigations are immensely complicated and can take several weeks to complete. “The worst thing to do is to blame or shame before the facts are known.”<\/p>\n
Carus said the training the Blackbird Mountain guides involved in the deadly avalanche had \u200creceived was the gold standard for the \u200bindustry.<\/p>\n
“These were people tested on their ability to manage clients in the terrain and manage \u200cexposure risk,” Carus said.<\/p>\n
The surviving skiers, who \u2060took refuge in a makeshift shelter \u200bconstructed partly from tarpaulin sheets after the avalanche, used emergency beacons and text messaging to communicate their location to rescuers.<\/p>\n
\n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEVADA CITY, Calif. \u2014 Investigators are working to determine if criminal negligence played a role in the avalanche…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185729,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,6996,6995,723,6813,1286,721,972,100,4201,6997,127,4509,821,4591,19],"class_list":{"0":"post-185728","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-california","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-california-headlines","10":"tag-california-news","11":"tag-cars","12":"tag-classifieds","13":"tag-crime","14":"tag-homes","15":"tag-jobs","16":"tag-law","17":"tag-local","18":"tag-news","19":"tag-radio","20":"tag-salt-lake","21":"tag-sports","22":"tag-television","23":"tag-traffic","24":"tag-utah","25":"tag-weather"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185728","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=185728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185728\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}