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To skiers, California’s monster blizzard this week didn’t scare them off the mountains — it beckoned them. They flocked to Tahoe in eager anticipation, settling in before wind and snow snarled traffic and shut down the roads to the mountains.
A group of eight close-knit friends were among the throngs of excited athletes. But after a devastating avalanche during the storm Tuesday, six of them, as well as three of the mountain guides they’d hired for an overnight backcountry ski trip, wouldn’t leave the mountains alive.
Few details have emerged about the decisions that led the group — including a tight-knit group of moms and four experienced backcountry guides — to venture to the isolated slopes of Castle Peak when the weather was so dangerous. Skiers, however, could understand the draw. During a Sierra winter that brought too few powder days, the storm was welcomed enthusiastically.
The victims were squarely within that community of serious mountain athletes. A statement from six of the grieving families said the ill-fated trip was planned well in advance by a group of close friends, “all of whom connected through the love of the outdoors. They were passionate, skilled skiers who cherished time together in the mountains.”
Authorities rescued six people from the mountain Tuesday but have not yet identified the nine victims because conditions on the mountain have remained too dangerous to retrieve their bodies. Families have named six of the dead: Carrie Atkin, who lived near Tahoe; Liz Clabaugh of Boise, Idaho; her sister, Caroline Sekar, of San Francisco; and Danielle Keatley, Kate Morse and Kate Vitt, all of whom lived north of San Francisco in Marin County.
It appears that at least some of their children were avid skiers, too. Kiren Sekar, Caroline Sekar’s husband, wrote in a statement to the New York Times that the pair had raised their children to love the sport. Sugar Bowl Resort confirmed that many of the people on the trip were connected with Sugar Bowl Academy, an elite ski and snowboarding preparatory school in Donner Pass. The school’s ski racers are perennial top competitors on high school circuits, according to people familiar with the sport, and graduates go on to ski at some of the top colleges in the country.
For a group of friends who loved skiing and shaped a family life around it, the pain of this loss centers on a cherished place: near the school, Sugar Bowl and Donner Pass, a Sierra skier dreamland of high annual snowfalls, cozy lodgings and thrilling steep terrain.
Sekar’s husband, Kiren, wrote in the statement that his wife had spent her final days “in her favorite place.”
Hush on the ski slopes
With a dormitory and classroom building steps from chair lifts rising into Sugar Bowl’s 1,600 skiable acres of steep chutes, skiable bowls and glade tree skiing, the Academy is a training ground for skilled mountain athletes.
“I look forward to seeing you at Sugar Bowl, the best place to do what we do,” the school’s director Stephen McMahon wrote in a Feb. 16 post to the school’s website, in which he cheered the falling snow and urged travel caution.
By Thursday morning, as the blizzard continued with near white-out conditions, Sugar Bowl closed due to storm conditions and the academy’s buildings appeared empty. Cars and trucks in the parking lot were buried under feet of snow. There were no footprints leading in and out of the buildings, though with the storm’s intensity any trace of them would have been snowed under within minutes. No one came to the door when a Bee reporter and a photojournalist visited just before 9 a.m.
While skiers and snowboarders in a parking lot just up the hill geared up, the swirling snow blanketed the school buildings in an eerie silence. That quiet was punctuated only by muffled bangs, as Sugar Bowl ski patrollers set off explosives in the peaks above to mitigate the danger of an avalanche inbounds at the resort.
Five days prior, on Feb. 15, the group of friends and guides had set out into the backcountry on the other side of the pass under very different weather conditions. The sun was shining that Sunday, though the forecast said the blizzard that would dump feet of snow and develop highly unsafe avalanche conditions Monday. As predicted, the storm started hard, and snowfalls whose intensity surprised even longtime area residents continued throughout that night and into Tuesday, when the group began their exit from backcountry huts they had been staying in near Castle Peak.
The group was skiing out of the widely-used backcountry area when the avalanche struck. It remains unclear if the avalanche came down on them from above, though officials said a member of the party saw the snow slide coming and had time to yell a warning before it reached them and buried most of the party. Six people survived, including four men and two women. Two of those people were hospitalized with serious injuries.
At the Academy, in the Bay Area, in Idaho and in ski towns around the lake were an untold number of grieving loved ones. “We are heartbroken and are doing our best to care for one another and our families in the way we know these women would have wanted,” the families wrote.
In a separate news release, the founder of Blackbird Mountain Guides, the company whose guides led the trip, expressed his own grief.
“In addition to mourning the loss of six clients, we also mourn the loss of three highly experienced members of our guide team,” Zeb Blais said. “We are doing what we can to support the families who lost so much, and the members of our team who lost treasured friends and colleagues.”
Since the avalanche, a chorus of questions has arisen — online and in ski shops and resort parking lots, among those who explore the backcountry on skis and those who don’t — about the group’s decision to carry on their trip in the face of the oncoming blizzard.
At the same time, others in the skiing community have spoken up in defense of the tourers, noting that backcountry skiers take on avalanche risks nearly every time they set off into the backcountry. They try to minimize that risk through route selection, training and the use of safety gear like carrying location-transmitting beacons and collapsible, lightweight snow shovels to dig each other out should the worst occur.
At 5 a.m. Tuesday morning, the Sierra Avalanche Center, which monitors the Tahoe area’s snowpack, had issued a high avalanche warning because of the rapid accumulation of new snowfall. “Natural avalanches are likely, and human-triggered avalanches large enough to bury or injure people are very likely,” that warning read. “Traveling in, near, or below backcountry avalanche terrain is not recommended during HIGH avalanche danger.”
Skiers and snowboarders, including the professionals who examine the snowpack and forecast avalanche risks, do venture out into the backcountry during such periods of elevated risk. They can do so safely by staying far from any slopes steep enough to give way under them or send an avalanche down on top of them. It remains unclear how and why the group decided to start skiing out of the backcountry, or what route decisions they made before getting caught in Tuesday’s avalanche. Multiple investigations by different agencies are underway.
Both Blais and the families of the six mothers emphasized that the skiers on the trip were no rookies. The skiers were trained in backcountry travel, trusted the professional guides they had chosen and carried the full suite of avalanche safety equipment.
The mothers were experienced backcountry skiers, the statement said. They “deeply respected the mountains.”
They were on an adventure.
This story was originally published February 20, 2026 at 5:37 PM.
Ariane Lange reports on regional transportation for The Sacramento Bee. She was a USC Center for Health Journalism 2023 California Health Equity Fellow. Previously, she worked at BuzzFeed News, where she covered gender-based violence and sexual harassment.
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Andrew Graham,Ariane Lange
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