Truckee backcountry-education and guiding company owner Sarah Reynaud and her husband and two daughters had a trip booked to the Frog Lake Huts for the same three days as the party hit by Tuesday’s deadly avalanche.
But for an illness, Reynaud said Thursday, “We would’ve been with that group.”
Instead, she watched the tragedy send shudders of grief through much of Northern California’s devoted skiing community.
Reynaud had never visited Frog Lake, which opened to the public just five years ago after nearly 100 years of private ownership. The lake and its environs are described by the Truckee Donner Land Trust, which manages the huts, as “one of the snowiest places in the western hemisphere.”
The Donner trust, in partnership with the Trust for Public Land and The Nature Conservancy, purchased Frog Lake and its surroundings in 2020 for $15 million. The land trust built the three huts, which feature heat, flush toilets, hot and cold water, and help from an on-site “hutmaster,” according to the land trust. A communal lodge for all guests has a fireplace and full kitchen.
“I was excited to go,” Reynaud said. “It’s a beautiful place that the land trust has put together.”
Instead, one of the couple’s teen daughters got sick, and the family canceled the trip.
Now, Reynaud, who owns the Tahoe Mountain School with her husband, Sierra Avalanche Center forecaster Steve Reynaud, is waiting like many in the Lake Tahoe region for any news of the tragedy. While it was not immediately clear how many locals were among the eight skiers killed by the slide and the one person presumed dead, police said three guides from Blackbird Mountain Guides in Truckee were among those who didn’t survive.
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“It’s a really tight community, and it’s really devastating,” Reynaud said. “It’s just a horrific situation.”
Reynaud compared the reverberating grief from Tuesday’s catastrophe to what followed the massive avalanche that killed seven people at Alpine Meadows near Lake Tahoe in 1982.
“It just affected so many people,” Reynaud said.
Reynaud, along with many in Lake Tahoe’s outdoors community, and around the Bay Area, and across the U.S., was also waiting for answers about the circumstances of the tragedy, which occurred at a time of high avalanche danger.
“My neighbor was just asking, ‘Why were they out there?” Reynaud said. “I can’t answer that.”
Blackbird has the most experienced ski guides of any company in the region, Reynaud said.
Those answers may provide important insights into travel to and from the huts, she said. While a great deal of historical information has been gathered about visiting the Peter Grubb Hut, which has been open to the west of Frog Lake for more than eight decades and has seen many avalanches, winter backcountry travelers have only been visiting Frog Lake for a few years, Reynaud said.
The land trust notes on its website that all three routes it recommends for accessing and exiting Frog Lake have “some degree” of avalanche risk.
“On a high avalanche day, maybe there isn’t a safe way to go in and out of there,” Reynaud said.
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