Blackbird Mountain Guides Was Built on Avalanche Safety, Then One Struck

Zebulon “Zeb” Blais has skied six of the seven continents, summited Mount Everest twice, and built what would become a leading provider of avalanche education in North America. He holds the highest professional avalanche certifications available.

He also knows, firsthand, what it feels like to be buried by one.

On the morning of Feb. 17, an avalanche swept through a 15-person group near Castle Peak in the Sierra Nevada — four of them guides from Blais’ company, Blackbird Mountain Guides — as they returned from a three-day backcountry ski trip.

Nine people are dead, including three of Blackbird’s own guides. It’s the deadliest avalanche in modern California history, and it struck a company that built its identity around the idea that preparation, training and sound judgment could keep people alive in exactly this kind of terrain.

“I’ve had some close calls with avalanches,” Blais said in a 2024 episode of Mountain Voices, a podcast series from the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation, where he described being buried in the snow. “And what it comes down to is really it’s all about human factors and decision making. We typically have a good idea of when the snowpack is unstable. We can read the forecast, we can see that a storm just came in, and we ignore it because of pressure from our group, pressure we put on ourselves.”

The tragedy has thrust Blackbird into the center of a painful and still-unresolved question that even its founder had already tried to answer out loud: How does something like this happen to people who seemed to know better than almost anyone what the mountains can do?

What is Blackbird

Founded by Blais in 2020, Truckee-based Blackbird Mountain Guides offers mountaineering courses, backcountry ski trips, and guided expeditions in California, Washington and internationally. It is not a casual operation. By one key industry measure, it was the most significant avalanche education provider in the country.

In October 2024, the American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education named Blackbird the most prolific AIARE provider in North America for the 2023-2024 season. They trained more students and ran more avalanche courses than any other provider in the US.

“For years, founder Zeb Blais and the Blackbird team have worked tirelessly to gain the trust of thousands of students, one small group at a time,” the company said in a LinkedIn post at the time.

The credentials of Blackbird’s guide team reflect that identity. Of the 39 guides listed on the company’s website before February’s avalanche, 35 carry Wilderness First Responder certifications. Thirty-five are listed as AIARE Course Leaders — certified to teach avalanche safety courses.

Seven hold AIARE’s highest level of avalanche certification. Eight hold the International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations/American Mountain Guide designation, regarded as the gold standard in international mountain guiding. Twelve are AMGA Certified Ski Guides.

The AIARE designations require multi-day, field-based training and formal assessment in avalanche terrain, including rescue scenarios and hazard evaluation. Course Leaders are authorized not just to take classes, but to teach them and mentor other instructors. The highest avalanche certifications in AIARE’s professional track are typically earned only after years of field experience.

Similarly, AMGA certifications require a multi-year progression of documented guiding days, technical exams and in-person assessments in alpine, rock and ski terrain.

California law does not require those credentials to guide paying clients in avalanche terrain, but within the industry, they function as markers of advanced professional competence.

All four guides on the Castle Peak trip reportedly carried those kinds of credentials. In a statement released Wednesday, Blais said they were all AMGA-trained or certified and AIARE instructors, certified to teach avalanche education.

Three of those four guides were killed: Andrew Alissandratos, 34, of Verdi, Nevada; Michael Henry, 30, of Soda Springs; and Nicole Choo, 42, of South Lake Tahoe.

“Skilled professionals, colleagues, and friends whose passion for the mountains shaped who we are,” Blackbird said of them in a statement released Saturday, after all nine victims had been identified.

Blackbird Mountain Guides did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Blais did not respond to a request for comment.

A trusted name in the backcountry community

Blackbird had more than 270 Google reviews at the time of the accident; all of them five-star. CapRadio reached out to more than a dozen former Blackbird customers in the wake of the avalanche. Most declined to comment. Those who did speak described guides as meticulous, knowledgeable and genuinely invested in safety education rather than pushing clients toward risk.

Brian Stenerson, a Tahoe-area snowboarder who took an AIARE Level 2 avalanche course with Blackbird, said the experience was thorough.

“From the beginning, they were very knowledgeable, very smart, very professional and very friendly,” Stenerson said. “There’s no question in my mind that they were doing their best job. I would 100% have recommended them.”

Reno-based physical therapist and experienced backcountry skier Matthew Oravitz joined a Blackbird-coordinated trip in Japan. He said the guide’s approach was defined by careful communication and clear authority, without any pressure to push beyond comfort.

“My experience with them is that they’re very open, but they’re not very persuadable,” Oravitz said. “The guide was clearly in charge. He was comfortable making the final decision with some input from us, but it was never like we could overrule him.”

Oravitz said he still trusts the company enough that, despite the accident, he is moving forward with a summer rock climbing trip to Chamonix, France — and plans to request Blais as his guide. “When I worked with Blackbird, I felt like they were experts and they did the work to get there,” he said.

The trip

The group was on a three-day excursion to the Frog Lake Huts, a backcountry cabin complex northwest of Truckee owned by the Truckee Donner Land Trust. The huts are well-appointed for a backcountry setting with a commercial kitchen, communal dining hall and heated sleeping quarters.

Blackbird lists the trip for as much as $1,165 per person.

The terrain surrounding the huts, per Blackbird’s own listing, ranges from intermediate to expert level and requires participants to have a minimum of 20 days of prior backcountry experience. Clients were required to bring their own avalanche safety gear: beacon, shovel, and probe; group safety equipment was provided by the guides.

The group departed Sunday, Feb 15. On Tuesday morning, as conditions deteriorated, the group decided to leave early, Nevada County Sheriff Shannan Moon said Saturday, trying to get off the mountain ahead of the weather. The route they were on when the avalanche struck was described by officials as “a normally traveled route.”

A 911 call came in at approximately 11:30 a.m. The avalanche was classified as a D2.5, on a scale where a D2 is powerful enough to bury a person and a D3 can destroy a house. Its path was roughly the size of a football field.

Of the 15 people in the group, two individuals near the rear were not swept away, according to early reports from the sheriff’s office. Twelve were buried. Nine of them did not survive.

According to Nevada County Sheriff’s Lt. Dennis Haack, the survivors had already located three of the buried victims by the time the first rescue teams made contact at 5:30 p.m., working through what officials described as white-out conditions.

A warning the company helped spread

Blackbird Mountain Guides did not shy away from the fact that it operates trips in inclement weather.

“Do not expect a trip to be cancelled due to weather. Unless we specifically cancel the trip, please assume the trip will run regardless of weather,” the company’s policies page reads, adding that both California and Washington State “have severe weather that can make travel extremely difficult.”

The page also specifies that refunds cannot be given due to weather, environmental conditions “or other unforeseen circumstances beyond our control that causes a trip to be cancelled.”

The victims’ families said the friend group had organized their trip to the Frog Lake Huts “well in advance.”

Publicly, Blackbird often posted about backcountry skiing and avalanche education. A backcountry skiing post authored by Blais in November 2025 outlined a recommended gear checklist, including an avalanche beacon, helmet and first aid kit.

The post tells skiers to track snow and weather patterns, check regional avalanche centers — including the Sierra, East Sierra and Mt. Shasta avalanche centers — for advisories, and to practice avalanche rescue with travel partners.

The Sierra Avalanche Center had posted an avalanche watch on Sunday, Feb. 15, the same day the 15-person group set out for Frog Lake. That was upgraded to an avalanche warning on Tuesday, hours before the deadly slide swept the skiers away.

The company’s social media accounts also include multiple posts about snow conditions in the region, with guides performing compression tests out in the field.

A video posted Feb. 15 from the Mt. Rose area of Nevada warns of a “big storm incoming” and noted a weak layer of snow, which “could lead to some unpredictable avalanches.”

Another video from Feb. 13, filmed in the North Lake Tahoe area, showed a guide executing a compression test on the snow and said to “watch out for that weak layer!”

Chris Feutrier, forest supervisor for the Tahoe National Forest, confirmed the avalanche had occurred when “a persistent weak layer had a large load of snow over the top of it.” The precise scenario Blackbird’s own post had flagged days earlier.

Whether and how the guides weighed those conditions against the decision to proceed remains under investigation. Moon said the company had been cooperative. “Those are the decisions the guide company clearly had made,” she said Wednesday. “We’re still in conversation with them on the decision factors that they made.”

Blackbird required participants to carry trip insurance on its international excursions, including $250,000 in evacuation and repatriation coverage and $50,000 in medical coverage. But this insurance was only recommended for clients on domestic trips.

The victims

The six clients who died were Carrie Atkin, 46, of Soda Springs; Lizabeth Clabaugh, 52, of Boise, Idaho; Danielle Keatley, 44, of Soda Springs and Larkspur; Kate Morse, 45, of Soda Springs and Tiburon; Caroline Sekar, 45, of Soda Springs and San Francisco; and Katherine Vitt, 43, of Greenbrae. They were part of a group of eight friends who had organized the trip together, all of them experienced backcountry skiers.

In a joint statement, their families described them as “passionate, skilled skiers who cherished time together in the mountains” who “trusted their professional guides on this trip” and “were fully equipped with avalanche safety equipment.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said some of the victims were family friends, called the event “the most devastating avalanche, in terms of loss of life, we’ve ever experienced” in California.

“These were some experienced guides that were out there,” he said. “And that’s what’s even more concerning and disturbing about this.”

Questions remain

The California Division of Occupational Safety and Health confirmed it has opened a workplace safety investigation into Blackbird. State law requires Cal/OSHA to complete its investigation within six months and issue citations if it finds violations. The agency has not provided additional details.

When it comes to how companies like Blackbird are regulated, the picture is murky. California has no dedicated professional license for backcountry ski guides.

There is no state board that certifies them, no mandatory credential required to legally lead paying clients into avalanche terrain. The AMGA certifications and AIARE instructor designations that Blackbird’s guides carried are industry standards, widely expected by clients and insurers, but they are not legally required.

What regulation does exist comes primarily through other channels. Guide companies operating on federal public lands, which include most of the Sierra Nevada backcountry, must obtain special use permits or outfitter authorizations from land management agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service. Those permits impose insurance and safety requirements, but they are not professional licenses.

A search of OSHA’s complaint database found no prior complaints against Blackbird. California Secretary of State records show the company’s LLC paperwork is current.

Both Stenerson and Oravitz pushed back on the rush to blame that emerged online in the days after the slide. Neither had been on this trip, but both had traveled with Blackbird, and they kept returning to the same point: the mountains don’t yield, even to expertise.

“When people are casting judgment, they really have no idea what they’re talking about,” Stenerson said. “You can’t predict everything with 100% certainty. You use a handful of tools and your own risk tolerance to make the best decision you can. Unfortunately, this time it was a very sad outcome.”

Oravitz put it another way, on what it means to trust someone else’s expertise in a domain where certainty isn’t possible.

“Nobody goes out there for this outcome, and if you weren’t part of that group, everything that you’re doing is speculative and based on unvalidated assumptions,” he said. “That is the worst way to understand what is ultimately a tragedy for individuals, family and a community.”

It was a question Blais himself had tried to answer publicly, two years before the mountain answered it for him. In that 2024 podcast interview, he described the transceiver not as a symbol of danger, but of commitment. The one tool a guide straps on at the trailhead and doesn’t remove until the day is done, the thing that remains when everything else fails.

“We like to say, on at the car, off at the bar,” he said. “Number one is just choosing the right terrain for the conditions and avoiding avalanches in the first place. There’s a lot of uncertainty. So that’s why we rely on the transceiver.”

All nine victims were wearing theirs.

Sarit Laschinsky contributed to this story.