Avalanche watch in busy backcountry
Wild snow treks bring out more Tahoe skiers
Six months into the pandemic, Tristan Biles, a tech worker living in San Francisco, decided it was time to move to Lake Tahoe to fulfill his passion for skiing. He’d been driving up to the mountains on weekends, but as a newly remote worker it just made sense to relocate.
In October, he and his girlfriend moved to a condo near the Heavenly Mountain Resort gondola in South Lake Tahoe. But Biles soon grew tired of competing for turns with the mobs of weekend skiers at major resorts.
“It can be a little excruciating,” he said. In March, Biles and his girlfriend, Aubrey Worley, signed up for a beginners’ course in
backcountry skiing, a mellow yet challenging way to enjoy the snowy landscape. Many regard the activity — riding ungroomed slopes far from the resort crowds — as a purer expression of the mountain lifestyle.
“I love backpacking and being outdoors in general,” Worley said. “The thought of being able to explore the same way in winter sounded magical.”
Worley and Biles are part of a larger shift taking place in Tahoe this season that has some in the ski community on edge.
A convergence of circumstances is pushing more people into wild snow territory, stressing Tahoe’s modest backcountry infrastructure and increasing the risk of avalanche accidents. Outdoor recreation has boomed during the pandemic. City dwellers are relocating to the Sierra. Ski resorts are capping the number of daily guests.
Combine that with a decadelong climb in the number of backcountry skiers and it seemed the stage was set for problems. Ski resorts regularly conduct avalanche mitigation on their slopes, but the backcountry is a wild and hazardous environment where skiers die every year.
More people getting into backcountry activities is a good thing for the tourismdependent region, ski leaders reckon. But without smarter infrastructure planning and investment, it can also lead to problems for years to come: parking pileups, trampled wilderness and, in worst cases, deaths.
“We’re really concerned that someone will get injured — or worse,” said Greg Garrison, executive director of Tahoe Backcountry Alliance, a nonprofit that advocates for backcountry users.
While numbers of resort skiers in the United States have flagged for decades, backcountry skiing has been steadily rising in popularity, a shift attributed to better gear and higher lift ticket prices. Though it represents a fraction of the winter sports industry, it is the fastestgrowing segment, with gear sales rising from $39 million in 2017 to $79 million in 2020, according to Snowsports Industries America.
The pandemic has supercharged that shift.
Backcountry use is almost impossible to track, but locals say parking lots at Tahoe’s 50 or so backcountry trailheads fill up before 8 a.m. every day, and cars are constantly jamming up roadways near Sno Parks — the familyfriendly sledding areas dotting the region’s highways.
“It’s hard to fathom how many people are coming up here,” Garrison said. “It’s already overwhelming the resources of the basin.”
Gear shops across the West sold out of equipment before the season started. Snowmobile dealerships are seeing a spike in sales. Backcountry guide services in Tahoe are booked solid through the winter, even after some doubled their avalanche safety courses.
“It’s a national trend and it’s certainly happening here, too,” said Dave Polivy, who sits on Truckee’s town council and owns Tahoe Mountain Sports gear shop.
Accompanying the surge of interest is a rise in avalanche incidents. This winter is already one of the deadliest on record for U.S. avalanche fatalities, with 33 people — mostly backcountry skiers — dying in slides, primarily in Utah and Colorado.
“It’s unprecedented,” said Cody Townsend, a professional free skier from Tahoe City who skis big mountains around the world. “We’ve had some close calls (with avalanches) in the Sierra. But the rest of the Western U.S. is as touchy and dangerous as I’ve seen it.”
The threat hasn’t borne out in the Sierra, likely because snowfall is far below normal levels for this time of year. A March 2 reading showed the Sierra snowpack at 61% of historical levels.
California’s only avalanche death occurred last month when a backcountry skier from Oregon was caught in a slide and buried in the Klamath Mountains near the town of Etna (Siskiyou County). However, there have already been several close calls in the Tahoe area. Last month, a skier caught in a slide south of the basin suffered broken ribs and vertebrae as well as a punctured lung.
Tahoe’s snow sports leaders launched its first “backcountry safety awareness week” in December. It featured Zoom panels of prominent skiers, including Townsend, and educational videos. The experts didn’t mince words. In an announcement of the event, Garrison warned that the backcountry “is just as dangerous as it is appealing.”
Relative to downhill resort skiing, the barrier to entering the backcountry is high. A starter kit of requisite gear — including skis, bindings, beacon, shovel and probe — costs about $2,500, Polivy said. The sport demands that newcomers take at least one avalanche safety lesson before venturing into the woods and discourages skiers from touring alone.
The risks are much greater too. Ski resorts work to offset slide danger, and avalanche deaths at established ski areas are extremely rare. However, a skier died in an inbounds slide at Alpine Meadows last year. In the backcountry, skiers are on their own.
In Tahoe, classic backcountry peaks are accessible via trailheads on national forest lands and state parks ringing the basin and extending south into El Dorado County and east to Carson City, Nev.
After a burst of storms in February filled in the landscape with fresh powder, backcountry skiers triggered at least a half dozen avalanches, some of which “were very close calls,” said David Reichel, executive director of the Sierra Avalanche Center, which tracks slides and publishes a daily forecast. In one instance on Feb. 12, documented in a heartstopping Instagram video, a snowboarder triggered a slide that overtook him before he was able to pull out to safety.
When bad things happen in the backcountry, Tahoe first responders typically get the call. But there haven’t been many crises this year.
“We’re certainly seeing a lot of visitation to the backcountry, but we are lower than normal in respect to true backcountry emergencies,” said El Dorado County Sheriff ’s Deputy Greg Almos, who runs the county’s volunteer search and rescue team. His crew often deals with resort skiers who venture out of bounds and get in too deep. But so far, “we’re just not seeing those,” he said.
There has, however, been a noticeable rise in issues at Sno Parks. Of the 16 incidents Almos’ team has responded to this winter, four involved sledders at snow parks who wandered off and became lost in the snow — an anomaly.
“That’s been shocking,” Almos said.
This year’s pressures have backcountry leaders pushing for infrastructure improvements capable of sustaining higher volumes of skiers and sledders for years to come.
Parking availability is the biggest issue. In some cases, backcountry spots behind residential neighborhoods stir up tensions between visiting skiers and local homeowners. Many areas are accessible via entry points off highways and interstates, where drivers jam up pullouts and shoulders. Others are located on parklands that don’t shovel parking lots in the winter, causing pileups outside snow gates.
“It quickly becomes a junk show,” Reichel said.
The U.S. Forest Service oversees most of the basin’s landmass but employs fewer staffers during the winter and can’t keep up with parking problems, snow removal, trail maintenance and garbage collection everywhere skiers and sledders go.
“It’s really tough for one agency to address everything that needs to happen,” said Lisa Herron, public affairs specialist for the Forest Service’s Lake Tahoe Basin Management Unit. “It’s much easier when we have more people working towards that common goal.”
The Forest Service is in the midst of crafting a comprehensive plan to set new rules for winter backcountry use in the basin, an expansive public process that could bring improvements many in the ski community are seeking. But it’s years away from fruition.
In the meantime, Garrison’s alliance is stitching together resources to experiment with solutions.
At a classic area near Donner Summit, the alliance brokered a deal two years ago with a homeowners association, local land trust and California State Parks to establish a new winter trailhead and regular parking lot plowing.
The group has installed trailhead counters at three popular spots around the lake to gain a clearer understanding of how many people ski there and how often.
“We need numbers to reinforce how important this sport is and to get the land managers to acknowledge that,” Garrison said.
A “microtransit” program is also in its nascent stage. Last winter, the alliance commissioned a fleet of SUVs and drivers to shuttle skiers from Tahoe City along the West Shore. (The program was scrubbed this year due to the pandemic.) “The longterm goal is to have that program throughout the basin,” Garrison said.
For now, the ski community is hoping to get through the winter without a backcountry fatality. But the issues will emerge again with the approach of next year’s snow season.
“We’re scrambling right now to prepare for the future,” Garrison said. “The numbers are only going to increase.”