One person was killed and one other person was injured in an avalanche at a popular ski resort in Lake Tahoe in California on Wednesday, the authorities said.
Two other people were caught in the avalanche but were pulled to safety, officials said at a news conference on Wednesday afternoon. Search efforts had concluded as of Wednesday afternoon, they said.
The avalanche occurred around 9:30 a.m., 30 minutes after the ski area opened, the resort said in a post on social media. The Placer County Sheriff’s Office said that the avalanche’s debris field was “approximately 150 feet wide, 450 feet long and 10 feet deep.”
The authorities identified the victim as Kenneth Kidd, 66, of California, in an update on Facebook. The person who was injured was being treated for a minor leg injury, officials said.
“This is a very sad day for my team and everyone here,” Dee Byrne, the president and chief operating officer of the resort, said at the news conference. She added that it was “a dynamic situation” and that more updates on the avalanche would follow.
“No further missing persons have been reported,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement. “More than 100 Palisades personnel participated in a beacon search, and two probe lines have been completed. The mountain is closed for the remainder of the day.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California said in a statement earlier on Wednesday that his office was monitoring the situation and that CalFire was “moving resources and personnel” to help with rescue efforts.
The Palisades side of the mountain, where the avalanche occurred, is home to the KT-22, a popular chairlift that opened for the first time this season on Wednesday morning. Over a six-minute ride, the chairlift shepherds skiers to an area where they can access multiple runs to traverse 1,800 feet to the bottom.
Michael Steinberg, a student at California State University, Chico, and a storm chaser for Live Storms Media, said in a message that three ambulances, a fire truck, a rescue truck and multiple firefighters were present when he arrived at Tahoe Palisades about an hour and a half after the avalanche.
According to the Sierra Avalanche Center, there was a risk of an avalanche on Wednesday and Thursday, as a major storm moved across the region.
The greater Lake Tahoe area was under a winter storm warning until 1 a.m. on Thursday, according to the National Weather Service. Heavy snow was expected, with accumulations of a foot to 18 inches, and a chance of as many as 30 inches of snow over the highest peaks. Wind gusts were expected to be as high as 50 miles per hour.
The resort, in Olympic Valley, Calif., opened in 1949 and hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics. It is the largest ski resort in the snow-rich Lake Tahoe region, with 6,000 skiable acres across two mountains, according to its website. On average, it receives about 400 inches of snow annually.
The resort adopted its current name in 2021 after acknowledging that its former name, Squaw Valley, included a “racist and sexist slur” whose use is “contrary to our company’s values.”
In 2020, an avalanche in the Alpine Meadows region of the resort killed one skier and seriously injured another. Two lawsuits were filed against the ski resort, including allegations of negligence and a wrongful death claim. Both suits were settled in 2022.
Jesus Jiménez contributed reporting.
