The aerial footage is almost impossible to comprehend. Snow — mountains of it — has swallowed entire buildings whole. What appear to be rooftops peek out barely above the white expanse. These are the Frog Lake Backcountry Huts near Castle Peak in California’s Sierra Nevada, and just days earlier, they were home to a group of fifteen friends, adventure-seekers, mothers, and professional guides embarking on a three-day backcountry ski trip.
None of them could have known that Tuesday, February 17, 2026, would be the last morning nine of them would ever see.
The Trip That Ended in Tragedy
The expedition was organized by Blackbird Mountain Guides, a respected Western mountaineering company that markets the Frog Lake huts — situated north of Donner Summit — as “luxury dormitories” in one of the most dramatic high-alpine settings in North America. A three-to-four-day stay, priced at $1,795 per person, draws experienced backcountry skiers eager to access terrain that was closed to the public for nearly a century before the Truckee Donner Land Trust reopened it in 2020.
The group of fifteen — four guides and eleven clients — had begun their journey on Sunday. By all accounts, they were prepared. All carried avalanche beacons. The guides were certified instructors with the American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education. Many of the clients were veteran backcountry skiers who had spent years in the Sierra Nevada range.
On Tuesday morning, their third day, they packed up and began skiing out toward the trailhead. The storm had been relentless — the region, one of the snowiest places in the entire Western Hemisphere, had received three to six feet of fresh snow since Sunday. Winds howled at gale force. Temperatures plummeted below freezing.
Approximately a half-mile from the safety of the huts, somewhere around 11:30 a.m., someone in the group looked uphill and screamed one word: “Avalanche.”
They had no time to react.
“It Overtook Them Rather Quickly”
Nevada County Sheriff’s Captain Rusty Greene described the moment with grim simplicity. The warning cry was barely out of the skier’s mouth before the wall of snow — a slide roughly the size of a football field — crashed down a north-facing slope from a height of around 8,200 feet and buried nearly the entire group.
Six survivors — four men and two women — were pulled from the snow or dug themselves out. They activated their avalanche beacons and used the SOS satellite feature on their iPhones to alert rescuers. One guide was able to send text messages. Rescue teams traveled for hours by snowcat before skiing the final stretch to reach the survivors by 5:30 p.m. Two were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.
For the other nine, help came too late.
Remembering the Lost
Eight of the nine were found in the days that followed. The ninth missing skier — initially feared buried beneath the deepest drifts — was located relatively close to the others on Friday and recovered, Nevada County Lt. Dennis Haack confirmed Saturday, bringing the agonizing search and recovery operation to a close.
Among the nine victims were six close friends — Carrie Atkin, Kate Morse, Danielle Keatley, Caroline Sekar, Kate Vitt, and Liz Clabaugh — all mothers and wives who shared a deep bond forged through a love of the mountains. Their families issued a joint statement describing them as “experienced backcountry skiers who deeply respected the mountains” and who had “trained and prepared for backcountry travel.” Three of the guides from Blackbird Mountain Guides also perished. The remaining victims were later identified as Andrew Alissandratos, Nicole Choo, and Michael Henry.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, who revealed that his wife had personal connections to some of the victims and that he himself had stayed in those same huts just a year earlier, offered his condolences. “Our hearts go out to those that lost their lives and a community of skiers, a community of families from the Bay Area,” he said.
One of the victims was the spouse of a member of the Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue team — one of the very teams deployed to recover the bodies. “This incident has specifically struck our organization and that team hard,” said Placer County Sheriff Wayne Woo.
The Deadliest in Nearly Half a Century
The Castle Peak avalanche is now confirmed as the deadliest avalanche in the United States since 1981, when eleven climbers lost their lives on Mount Rainier, Washington. It is also the worst backcountry ski avalanche in the history of the sport. On average, avalanches kill twenty-five to thirty people in the U.S. every winter, according to the National Avalanche Center. This single event nearly tripled that typical annual toll.
The Sierra Avalanche Center noted the slide occurred on terrain that, while relatively low-elevation, was directly exposed to runout from much steeper slopes above — a critical and deadly combination in the context of a historically powerful storm system. As of this writing, the trigger of the avalanche remains under investigation. The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) has opened a formal probe into Blackbird Mountain Guides, with up to six months to issue any findings.
Questions about group dynamics, route selection, and the decision to travel during such extreme weather conditions are also being examined by avalanche experts and safety investigators.
A Community in Mourning
The Donner Summit backcountry and broader Lake Tahoe alpine community — tight-knit, proud, and deeply rooted in mountain culture — has been shattered. The Sugar Bowl Academy, an elite ski school with ties to several of the victims, said simply: “We are an incredibly close and connected community. This tragedy has affected each and every one of us.”
All nine bodies have now been hoisted out by helicopter and transported to a staging area near the very huts where the group had been staying — the same snow-buried structures now immortalized in that haunting aerial footage that has stunned the world.
The mountain that gave them joy, adventure, and community ultimately took everything. What remains is grief, questions, and the solemn promise of those left behind to remember them as they lived — fearlessly, together, in the mountains they loved.