By admin 
The Nevada County Sheriff’s Office has finished its investigation into the circumstances of February’s deadly avalanche, which killed nine backcountry skiers and snowboarders, and submitted its findings to the county prosecutor’s office for a review, an agency spokesperson told The Sacramento Bee on Friday.
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A prosecutorial review is the normal next step in a criminal investigation and does not necessarily mean charges will be filed, and it’s not clear how long that review could go on in this case. Nevada County District Attorney Jesse Wilson did not immediately respond to a voicemail Friday afternoon.
Also this week, the county coroner’s office released partially redacted reports confirming that all nine of the people died from asphyxiation after being buried under the snow.
Sheriff Shannan Moon opened her agency’s investigation into possible criminal negligence by Blackbird Mountain Guides in the immediate aftermath of the avalanche, as questions swirled about why the company’s guided group chose to travel through risky terrain amid a historically intense blizzard. The day of the avalanche, snow forecasters issued a dire warning for people to stay out of the backcountry due to the high risk of slides.
The Blackbird group ultimately traveled too close to Perry’s Peak, a slope loaded with rapidly falling snow, and triggered a large avalanche that ran out 400 feet and completely buried all but two skiers in the fifteen-member party. Skiers and snow safety experts, including the authors of an incident report published by the Sierra Avalanche Center, which issued the warning, found the group violated avalanche protocols during their attempted exit from the backcountry on Feb. 17, the day of the slide.
The unburied people were able to quickly rescue four of their companions, digging furiously through the snow until they believed they could not save others. The diggers than turned to keeping themselves and two injured skiers alive amid the fierce blizzard.
The nine people who were killed were all found buried under five to six feet of snow by the Search and Rescue team that traveled out into the blizzard the day of the avalanche, according to new redacted reports released by the Nevada County Coroner Division. The first rescuers reached the scene at around 5:36 p.m., after receiving word of the avalanche at around 11:30 that morning, the coroner reported.
The coroner found that all nine victims died of asphyxiation — in other words that they suffocated under the packed snow. Previous official reports and the accounts two survivors of the trip gave The New York Times have long indicated the people who died were completely buried under the snow, but the precise cause of death was not known until now. Avalanche deaths can also occur through blunt force trauma as the snow slides slam into people and sweep them into trees or boulders, or in some cases over cliff edges. The majority of avalanche deaths however are due to asphyxiation, not trauma.
Though each of the nine reports labeled the cause of death as asphyxiation due to burial in snow, sections describing the conditions of the bodies were redacted.
According to the report, the rescuers on the first day dug out eight of the nine dead. As blizzard conditions increasingly worsened, the search and rescue team laid the bodies together and covered them with a tarp, marking the spot with GPS coordinates and long poles used to probe for people buried under avalanches. They finished this work at around 10 p.m. amid heavy snowfall. The blizzard prevented further recovery efforts for the next two days.
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On Feb. 20, teams returned to the avalanche site. They recovered the eight bodies and located the missing ninth person. All nine bodies were airlifted to Frog Lake Huts, the backcountry lodging the group stayed at for two nights before the avalanche.
The bodies were then taken out of the backcountry by a snowcat before being transported to a mortuary in Truckee.
Stark warning
The group included eight women, longtime friends and veteran backcountry skiers with children who also skied and in some cases raced. Many of them split time between Tahoe homes and the Bay Area and shared a love of the mountains, according to their family members. With them were three male clients and skiers, and four guides from Blackbird.
The guides were transplants from Florida, Vermont and Ontario, Canada, who’d moved to the Tahoe area to pursue mountain lives. They had varying levels of experience but, according to Blackbird, all had certification through the American Mountain Guiding Association.
The day of the avalanche, the center forecast clearly stated the risk.
“Avalanches could be triggered from very low on the slope in some areas,” the center wrote in a statement published early that morning. “Avalanches from above could travel down through treed terrain, often thought of as ‘safe’ during storms. Travel in, near, or below avalanche terrain is not recommended.”
There’s still been no official word whether the Blackbird guides saw that warning, though there are indications they had internet access at the huts and that it’s company policy for the company’s guides to communicate with managers in the office about routes and conditions. The two survivors who spoke to The Times said that on the morning of the avalanche the guides emerged from a meeting and told the group they would move quickly to try and get out of the backcountry and back to their cars as the blizzard intensified.
The authors of the Sierra Avalanche Center report noted their investigation was hampered by an inability to interview the survivors, including the one surviving guide. That person’s account is still not public. No survivor statements appeared in the coroner reports.
Previous Sacramento Bee reporting has suggested the group ultimately strayed too near to Perry’s Peak, when there was safer terrain just to their east. The guides leading the group may not have realized precisely where they were in relation to the dangerous slope, or may have underestimated the length an avalanche could run in that spot.
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