Eight skiers who went missing after an avalanche swept the Castle Peak area of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California have been confirmed dead, authorities said during a Wednesday press conference.
One skier is still unaccounted for, while six others, who had been stranded, have since been rescued.
The avalanche, which now ranks as the deadliest single avalanche in the US in 45 years, occurred about 10 miles (16km) north of Lake Tahoe at about 11.30am on Tuesday, engulfing a group of backcountry skiers – including four guides and 11 clients.
The sheriff’s office revised the number of people in the group to 15 from an earlier estimate of 16. “This is an ongoing incident and some facts do change,” Nevada county sheriff Shannan Moon said at Wednesday’s press conference. Although 12 people had signed up for the ski tour, “one person last minute decided to back out of that trip”.
The sheriff’s office received a 911 call reporting the avalanche around 11.30am on Tuesday. About 46 emergency first responders joined the search party, which included a Sno-Cat vehicle, Moon said.
The Sno-Cat was able to reach a location about 2 miles from where the six survivors were sheltering in a makeshift refuge constructed partly from tarpaulin sheets, the Nevada county sheriff’s office said in a Facebook post late on Tuesday.
Search and rescue volunteers skied the remaining 2 miles, where they found the six survivors, who had been able to recover three of the missing skiers’ bodies, Moon said. First responders were able to find five additional bodies, but were not able to return them to the Sno-Cat due to weather conditions.
Two of the six surviving skiers were “not mobile because of the injuries they survived during the avalanche”, Moon said.
“Due to extreme weather conditions, it took several hours for rescue personnel to safely reach the skiers and transport them to safety where they were medically evaluated by Truckee Fire,” the sheriff’s office statement said.
The two injured skiers were transported to the hospital, Moon said. One was stabilized and released while the other was still being treated for non-life-threatening injuries.
Of the six survivors, five were clients of the ski company and one was a tour guide. The sheriff’s office did not provide any additional information on the deceased, except that “one of the nine missing decedents is a spouse of one of our Tahoe Nordic search and rescue team members”, said Sheriff Wayne Woo of Placer county, which provided mutual aid to Nevada county.
Conditions in the area this week, with heavy snowfall, strong winds and low visibility have created what scientists at the Central Sierra Snow Lab called some of the worst conditions the region has experienced in years.
In 1981 11 people died when a mountaineering group was engulfed by an avalanche on Mount Rainier in Washington state.
The Sierra Sun said that ski rescue teams had been dispatched from the Boreal Mountain ski resort and Tahoe Donner’s Alder Creek adventure center to make their way to the known survivors.
The Colorado avalanche information center has tallied six US avalanche deaths so far this season. It says avalanches have claimed an average of 27 lives a year over the past decade in the US.
The avalanche near Truckee, California, occurred during a winter storm warning for much of northern California, with heavy snow forecast for higher elevations of the Sierra Nevada. The town of Soda Springs, near where the avalanche took place, recorded at least 30in of snow during a 24-hour period, according to the Soda Springs Mountain Resort.
The dangerous conditions were caused by rapidly accumulating snow piling on fragile snowpack layers coupled with gale-force winds. The avalanche was “about a football field in length”, said Chris Feutrier, forest supervisor of the Tahoe national forest, which hosts the Sierra Avalanche Center. The terrain where it occurred has since reloaded with another 3ft of snow, meaning “the hazard remains high” of another avalanche occurring.
The Sierra avalanche center had posted an alert before dawn on Tuesday, warning of a “high avalanche danger” in the ski region, the sheriff’s office said. The center lists five other avalanche incidents so far this season with six killed.
“It’s particularly dangerous in the backcountry right now just because we’re at the height of the storm,” Brandon Schwartz, Tahoe national Forest lead avalanche forecaster at the Sierra Avalanche Center, told the Associated Press.
Steve Reynaud, another Tahoe national forest avalanche forecaster with the Sierra Avalanche Center, said the skiers were on the last day of a three-day backcountry skiing trek, which had contact with people on the ground in the area.
Reynaud told the AP that the skiers spent two nights at huts on a trip that required navigating “rugged mountainous terrain” for up to 4 miles while bringing along all food and supplies.
Russell Greene, the Nevada county sheriff captain, said authorities had been notified about the avalanche by the ski tour company that led the expedition.
“I don’t think it was a wise choice,” Greene told the AP of the decision of a ski company to take paying customers out into the backcountry under such conditions, adding, “but we don’t know all the details yet”.
Reuters reported that the area around Castle Peak, a 9,110ft mountain north of Donner Summit, was a popular backcountry skiing destination. The summit is named for the infamous Donner party, a group of pioneers who resorted to cannibalism after getting trapped there in the winter of 1846-1847.
Gavin Newsom, the California governor, was briefed on the avalanche, and state authorities were “coordinating an all-hands search-and-rescue effort” in conjunction with local emergency teams, the governor’s office said on X.
“Please avoid the Sierras during this current storm in the upcoming days,” Woo said, in a plea to the public. “Please allow us to focus all of our resources on continuing to recover these bodies for the family and bring them home.”
