The Sierra Nevada avalanche struck a tight-knit group of friends, many of them women and many of whom went to college together at Stanford University, according to a man who lost two sisters in the tragedy.
McAlister Clabaugh, who is 50 and lives in Washington, D.C., said the sisters, Caroline Sekar and Liz Clabaugh, died in the avalanche that occurred in the Lake Tahoe region on Tuesday morning. Ms. Sekar, 45, lived in San Francisco, and Ms. Clabaugh, 52, lived in Boise, Idaho.
On Thursday, Mr. Clabaugh was trying to process the enormousness of his family’s loss.
“I’m just devastated,” he said, after pausing a moment to control his emotions. “These are two of the best people I’ve ever known. They were incredible sisters, mothers, wives and friends. And the idea that they are both gone is, I don’t even know how to put it into words.”
He said he had been texting with Ms. Sekar just last week about coming to visit her on the West Coast. She and her husband were in the process of setting up a guesthouse on their property, he said.
“I literally had it on my calendar to give her a call because we had been playing phone tag,” he said.
He said that Ms. Sekar had worked in tech but that her two children were her passion.
It is not clear whether the family was connected to Sugar Bowl Academy, a private, ski-focused school that said on Wednesday that multiple victims had ties to its community in Norden, Calif., several miles from where the avalanche occurred. Ski competition records show that two Sugar Bowl skiers in prior seasons, as recently as 2024, had the same last name.
Rescue workers have not yet been able to retrieve the eight people who were found dead on the mountain because of severe storm conditions, which were expected to continue at least through Thursday, Nevada County officials said. They said they would not be releasing the names of any other information about the victims until the bodies had been recovered. A ninth person remains missing but is presumed to be dead, according to officials.
The avalanche was the deadliest in modern California history, and one of the deadliest in the United States.
Mr. Clabaugh said he understood that the group of skiers had been friends since college and would meet up for ski trips regularly over the years.
“A lot of the people on that trip were Caroline’s friends who used to do this together,” he said. “There’s a whole community of people, a lot of whom just lost their wives.”
“It’s the worst nightmare,” he said.
Heather Knight and Soumya Karlamangla contributed reporting from San Francisco. Georgia Gee contributed research.
Sabrina Tavernise is a writer-at-large for The Times, focused on political life in America and how Americans see the changes in Washington.
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