By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES, Feb 17 (Reuters) – Nine skiers were missing early Wednesday after an avalanche in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains, but six others who had been stranded have since been rescued, authorities said.
The avalanche swept the Castle Peak area of Truckee, California, about 10 miles north of Lake Tahoe, at about 11:30 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday, engulfing a group of skiers, according to a Facebook statement posted by the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office.
Those rescued have varying injuries and two were sent to a hospital for treatment.
The sheriff’s office revised the number of people in the group to 15 from an earlier estimate of 16.
‘HIGH AVALANCHE DANGER’
If all nine of the missing skiers should perish, the incident would rank among the deadliest single avalanches on record in the United States. The Colorado Avalanche Information Center has tallied six U.S. avalanche fatalities so far this season.
Avalanches have claimed an average of 27 lives each winter in the United States over the past decade, the center reported.
A winter storm warning was in effect for much of northern California on Tuesday, with heavy snow forecast in the upper elevations of the Sierra Nevada.
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 statement said.
A spokesperson for the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office, Captain Russell Greene, said rescue teams had to navigate additional avalanche threats.
“It’s going to be a slow, tedious process because they also have to be very careful accessing the area due to the fact that the avalanche danger is still very high,” Greene said in an interview with Sacramento-based television station KCRA-TV.
“I don’t think it was a wise choice,” Greene said of the decision of a ski tour company to take paying customers out into the backcountry under such conditions.
Rescue ski teams were dispatched to the avalanche zone from the Boreal Mountain Ski Resort and Tahoe Donner’s Alder Creek Adventure Center.
The survivors had taken refuge in a makeshift shelter, constructed partly from tarpaulin sheets and communicated with rescuers via radio beacon and text messaging.
Greene declined to say how many of the ski guides and how many of their customers were among the missing.
Weather conditions remained hazardous in the Sierra backcountry slopes, with additional avalanche activity expected through Tuesday night and into Wednesday, according to the sheriff’s statement.
California Governor Gavin Newsom was briefed on the avalanche, and state authorities were “coordinating an all-hands search-and-rescue effort” in conjunction with local emergency teams, his office said in a posting on X.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Devika Nair in Bengaluru; Editing by Saad Sayeed, Edwina Gibbs and Nick Zieminski)
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