California's DEADLIEST Avalanche — Criminal Investigation OPENS on Castle Peak Guides

Описание: #CastlePeakAvalanche #BlackbirdMountainGuides #TahoeAvalanche

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Castle Peak claimed nine lives on February 17, 2026 as a football-field-sized slab released on a north-facing slope at 8,200 feet during a full avalanche warning, killing six clients and three of the four professional guides leading the trip. The Nevada County Sheriff's Office has opened a criminal negligence investigation into Blackbird Mountain Guides after confirming the company posted an Instagram video the day before the slide explicitly warning followers about a particularly weak layer across northerly aspects and variable elevations — the exact terrain they guided fifteen paying clients through the following morning. Cal OSHA has simultaneously launched a parallel workplace safety investigation, with six months to issue citations. Survivors sheltered under a tarp for six hours with no cell service, maintaining contact with rescuers through a single iPhone satellite SOS thread while the bodies of three of their friends lay in the snow around them. A five-day recovery operation involving Army Black Hawk helicopters, California National Guard aircraft, 42 volunteers and controlled explosive detonations was required to bring all nine victims off the mountain. The persistent weak layer that fractured beneath the group — the product of a sixty-percent snowpack drought followed by six feet of new snow in 72 hours — remains active in the Sierra Nevada snowpack. The same mechanism is documented this season across the Wasatch, the Rockies, and the Swiss Alps. With no federal licensing requirement for backcountry ski guides in the United States and the Frog Lake huts sitting on private land outside Forest Service jurisdiction, the regulatory vacuum that allowed this to happen remains completely intact.

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