Veen Firm Partner Theo Emison on the Castle Peak Avalanche

On February 17, 2026, an avalanche near Castle Peak killed nine backcountry skiers. It is the deadliest avalanche in the United States in more than four decades. Six members of the group survived. Many of the victims were mothers, wives, and close friends who shared a love of the mountains. Our hearts go out to their families and to the tight-knit communities around Tahoe, Marin County, and Boise that are grieving right now.

The group of 11 clients and four guides with Blackbird Mountain Guides had been on a three-day trip to the Frog Lake Backcountry Huts near Donner Summit. They were returning to the trailhead on the final day when the slide struck.

A rescue ski team on their way to the area of an avalanche in the Castle Peak area of Truckee, Calif., February 17, 2026.
Nevada County Sheriff’s Office

Veen Firm partner Theo Emison has skied the Sierra Nevada backcountry for over 25 years and knows the Castle Peak area well. The Veen Firm has long represented individuals and families in recreational activity and outdoor liability cases, and Theo brings both personal experience and professional perspective to what happened here. In interviews with ABC7’s Dan Noyes and the San Francisco Standard, he shared his thoughts.

“We have a pretty fundamental rule in avalanche education,” Theo told ABC7. “If it’s a high risk avalanche day, you stay out of avalanche terrain.”

Tuesday was a high risk day. The Sierra Avalanche Center had issued a HIGH danger warning, level four out of five, stating that travel in, near, or below avalanche terrain was “not recommended.” Natural avalanches were expected. Several ski resorts in the area closed entirely. Blackbird Mountain Guides itself had posted a video to Instagram on Monday documenting “atypical layering” in the snowpack and “a particularly weak layer in many northerly aspects, across various elevation bands.”

“There was a likelihood of natural avalanches, meaning non-human triggered avalanches, that day. There was a likelihood of human triggered avalanches that day,” Theo told ABC7. “It’s just a tragic thing that this group found themselves in that terrain at that time.”

Speaking with the San Francisco Standard, Theo described the Castle Peak area as “an absolute winter wonderland — a beautiful, majestic place.” But he said he would not have ventured there that weekend. “Absent some exigency, I would not have been in avalanche terrain yesterday — period,” he said. “I don’t know if it was a bad decision. … But ideally, you just don’t go into avalanche terrain on a day like yesterday.”

Another group of skiers who had been at the same Frog Lake huts left on Sunday, before the storm, specifically because they saw the danger building.

When people place their trust and their safety in the hands of professional guides, they are relying on those guides to make the hard call about when conditions are too dangerous to go. Nevada County Sheriff Shannan Moon has confirmed that authorities are in active conversations with Blackbird about the decisions that were made. The families who lost loved ones on that mountainside deserve a full understanding of how and why those decisions were made.

Theo Emison is a partner at the Veen Firm: a catastrophic injury law firm in San Francisco.