ALBANY\u00a0– A Rensselaer County high school graduate-turned-biotech executive was among nine people killed in California’s deadliest recorded avalanche this past Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Former Sand Lake\u00a0 resident Kate Pettrone Morse, 45, had resided in the San Francisco area when she embarked on a backcountry ski trip north of Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada mountains. She was the mother of three children.<\/p>\n
Morse’s death from the Castle Peak avalanche was first reported by Tiburon-based newspaper, The Ark. The names of the victims, including three guides, were announced by the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Angela Labombard, a former classmate of Morse at Averill Park High School, couldn’t tell right away that Morse was one of the victims because her maiden name, Pettrone, wasn’t included in early reports.<\/p>\n
“As a mother myself, I’m just so devastated for her kids and her husband,” Labombard told the Times Union.<\/p>\n
The two had graduated from Averill Park High School in the late 1990s.<\/p>\n
Labombard remembers Morse as early as elementary school. According to her, the track and field athlete and former Girl Scout was smiley, quick to befriend anyone and smart.<\/p>\n
“We all kind of knew each other here at Averill Park,” Labombard said. “She was always very smart and just the kind of person that you knew was going to do something.”<\/p>\n
Morse went on to attend Williams College in Massachusetts. She later received a master’s in business administration from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in New Hampshire. She spent a career in the pharmaceutical industry, most recently serving as vice president of commercial strategy at Septerna.<\/p>\n
In a Facebook post, former classmate Cristen Bryce said that she didn’t see her much after college, but that she would occasionally “grace us with her presence at the yearly\u00a0Taborton Christmas party.”<\/p>\n
“I probably haven’t seen her in over 5 years and we didn’t keep in touch\u00a0– but she was one of those people who you could just give a huge hug to and jump back in like you were together last week,” Bryce wrote.<\/p>\n