Castle Peak

I'm a professional free skier, a mountain guide, an Alaska heli-ski guide, a UC Berkeley molecular cell biology graduate, the founder and CEO of Snowbrains, and this podcast is gonna be a little bit different.

IFMGA guide, avalanche course instructor, and founder of Aspect Abby, Jeff Banks, is gonna join us as we discuss the Castle Peak avalanche in Lake Tahoe, California, that took nine souls in 2026.

This was the deadliest ski and snowboard-related avalanche incident in US history.

Since the end of last ski season, Snowbrains has been hard at work on a project that I'm really excited to share for the very first time here on the podcast.

It's nine people.

But it matters for understanding why we're giving this an hour.

Castle Peak is the deadliest avalanche accident involving skiers and snowboards, snowboarders in United States history, and it's tied for the deadliest in North American history, alongside a Canadian Mountain Holidays heli-ski avalanche in the Bugaboos of British Columbia, Canada, on March 12th, 1991, which also killed nine people.

So it's the deadliest avalanche of any kind in this country since 1981, when eleven climbers died on Mount Rainier in Washington, and is the deadliest avalanche in California history, passing the very well-known 1982 Alpine Meadows slide that killed seven, and they made that very good movie called Buried about that situation.