As the authorities begin to piece together what led to the deaths of at least eight people in an avalanche in the snowy backcountry near Lake Tahoe this week, the risks taken by the skiers and their guides — and who was responsible for fateful decisions — are likely to be a key area of inquiry.
California’s workplace safety agency, Cal-OSHA, said on Thursday that it had opened an investigation into Blackbird Mountain Guides, the company whose guides were leading the group.
The authorities have said that eight people died in the avalanche in the Sierra Nevada on Tuesday and that a ninth person is missing and presumed dead. Those nine included three experienced Blackbird guides, along with six of their clients, part of a group of mothers on the trip who knew one another and had skied regularly in the area.
Six other people in the party, including one other Blackbird employee, were rescued. The avalanche occurred near the end of the group’s three-day trip to a backcountry lodge known as the Frog Lake huts, near Castle Peak.
The authorities have not yet been able to return to the area to recover the bodies of those who died, and they have released few details about what they believe occurred.
However, forecasters and public safety officials had warned of a high risk of avalanches before the group began the trip, and additional warnings came during the trip itself.
Several experts and local officials cautioned that too little was yet known to assess whether Blackbird had been negligent.
In a statement on Thursday, Blackbird said that the guides on the trip were highly trained. “It’s too soon to draw conclusions, but investigations are underway,” the company said.
The accident highlights the lack of regulation around backcountry skiing, whose participants are practicing a more dangerous form of the sport in remote areas, without the conventional avalanche control programs at resorts.
Beyond Cal-OSHA’s regulations for workplace safety, oversight of the mountain and the outdoor excursions on it is limited, said Larry Heywood, a longtime snow and ski safety consultant who has lived and worked for decades in North Lake Tahoe. The mountain itself is mostly on federal land, he said, and the huts where the skiers stayed were on private property owned by a land trust.
He added that the U.S. Forest Service requires guides who operate on public land to obtain special use permits, and those typically require the operators to maintain safety plans and certify that their employees have appropriate qualifications and training. Skiers who venture into wilderness areas mostly do so at their own risk.
“In winter, people go out in hazardous conditions all the time,” he said.
Bruce Tremper, a former director of the Utah Avalanche Center and the author of “Staying Alive in Avalanche Terrain,” said that there was always a risk of avalanches.
“Even at low danger, you know you can find avalanches,” Mr. Tremper said. He added that even with that inherent risk, backcountry skiing is always safest with a local, experienced mountain guide. Accidents do happen to guided groups, he said, “but they’re very, very rare.”
Mr. Heywood said that backcountry guides typically require clients to sign liability waivers before their excursions begin, but the waivers are legally flimsy and often don’t hold up in court.
He said it was clear that “this is going to be a really big lawsuit.”
“This was a guided group with a very experienced outfitter with very qualified guides,” he added. “This simply should not have happened if you’re following the protocols of ski mountaineering. We don’t know what led to this and what the decision-making process was yet. But something didn’t go right.”
Jeffrey L. Kaloustian, a lawyer who handles ski-related personal injury cases in Grass Valley, Calif., said that liability waivers could not insulate the mountain guides from claims of reckless conduct or gross negligence, which does have a higher legal standard. What would constitute recklessness remains to be seen, he said, but ignoring or dismissing the seriousness of the avalanche hazard or weather forecasts could make a difference.
Avalanches happen with some regularity, he said, and they are one of the inherent risks of skiing, even in an organized ski area.
“You hire a guide service, and you put the responsibility on the guide service of not just making sure that you are on the appropriate route to get from your starting point to your destination, but also to be assessing and mitigating risk along the way and making decisions,” said Mr. Kaloustian, who also was a professional ski patroller at Palisades Tahoe and a former instructor, course director and mountain guide.
The circumstances around the avalanche are likely to revive a decades-long debate in California over how to regulate access to the outdoors.
While it might seem obvious to close off a whole mountain or national forest when there is extreme danger, it doesn’t always work.
“There’s no gate big enough or net large enough,” said Kurt Summers, who was a member of the Orange County Mountain Rescue Team for 15 years. He said that prevention through education was the best course of action. By the time rescuers can be called, he added, it is often too late.
David Reichel, executive director of the Sierra Avalanche Center, said that any proposal to limit public access to the backcountry when avalanche danger is high would face resistance. “There is some base line level of risk all winter long, and access to the backcountry is pretty intrinsic to mountain communities, so I would imagine quite a bit of pushback against such ideas,” he said.
Hardy Bullock, a member of the Nevada County Board of Supervisors who represents the area where the avalanche took place, said on Wednesday that during the pandemic, thousands of additional visitors had descended on the Lake Tahoe area, including many who did not have much experience with extreme sports.
He said that backcountry travel is generally restricted only when there is extreme fire danger.
“Anybody and their brother can go out there,” he said. “With that comes tremendous responsibility.”
Christina Morales is a national reporter for The Times.
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