At least 8 dead in California’s deadliest avalanche

What happened

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’s Mount Rainier in 1981.

Who said what

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 “someone saw the avalanche, yelled ‘Avalanche!’ and it overtook them rather quickly,” Capt. Russell Greene of the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office said at a news conference Wednesday.

After the avalanche hit, the “six survivors were able to use a combination of emergency beacons and iPhone SOS functions to contact rescuers, who braved treacherous conditions to reach them,” said The New York Times. The “dangerous, hourslong rescue effort” was “hampered by whiteout conditions and strong winds from the winter storm roaring through” the Donner Summit area, said CNN. Rescuers reached the survivors just before sunset. They were unable to remove the bodies of the eight dead skiers due to the “really horrific conditions,” said Nevada County Sheriff Shannan Moon.

An average of 27 people a year have died in U.S. avalanches in the past decade, according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. Tuesday’s tragedy was the second fatal avalanche near Castle Peak this year, after a snowmobiler was killed about a mile away in January.

What next?

“As families grieve and crews come up with a plan to remove the bodies from the mountain when it’s safe,” USA Today said, the company that led the expedition, Blackbird Mountain Guides, “is facing a tough question: Given the known dangers, why did they still go?” It is “unclear if the guides would have known” that the avalanche watch was elevated to a more imminent warning Tuesday morning, said The Associated Press, but Moon “said investigators would look into the decision to proceed with the trip on Sunday despite the forecast.”