Castle Peak and the Broken Discourse on Avalanche Incidents

Social media became the main conduit for discussing a generation-defining avalanche. In the process, conjecture and reaction reigned.

Colorado’s Never Summer Range

The storm came in off the Pacific in a dull grey and dropped inches of rain on the parched grass of the Sacramento Valley. It then rolled east, over the wooded Gold Country foothills, and began climbing. By the time it reached the peaks around Lake Tahoe, California, the sky was filled with thick, wet flakes. The clouds settled low, and a stiff gale blew over the high ridges.

Winter had at last returned to the tinder-dry Sierra, and in spectacular form. At times the snow came down at three to four inches per hour. Many skiers rejoiced. Interstate 80 near Donner Pass was closed. Avalanche forecasters noted rising danger. And on February 17th, a group of fifteen skiers and guides set out from a backcountry hut amid the storm. Simply trying to get home.

News soon broke that the group hadn’t reached the trailhead. Then reports came of an avalanche near Castle Peak outside of Truckee, California. As a harrowing rescue effort began, countless people took to social media.

“It is incredibly irresponsible to go back country [sic] skiing during a huge storm knowing there were avalanche warnings,” one user wrote on Instagram. “Now all search and rescue personnel are at risk too.”

“They had guides!” another commented. “Think about that, guides who should have known better and not put the skiers and rescuers [sic] lives in danger. I pray all are safe.”

News media soon reported on the topic. The New York Times jumped in with its feed-style, breaking-news coverage, while an Instagram account called NY Pulse News noted just days after the incident that “three ski guides posted about a big storm and weak snow just one day before an avalanche buried them alive. They took the most dangerous route down.” The post concluded with a halting, perhaps AI-derived appeal “please do like and comment your opinion below,” as images of the deceased rolled across the screen. Some included the blurred faces of their children.

For Grant Gunderson, a legendary action sports photographer who had just years prior been involved in a fatal avalanche in Japan, it was all too much.

“I’m frustrated that my feed is packed with avalanche posts—not because of the algorithm, but because too many outlets chase tragedy for clicks,” he posted to Instagram. “Let’s treat these incidents as learning opportunities, not excuses to pile on.”

The discourse around avalanche deaths has long been fraught. While discussions of snowpack, decision making, and group dynamics provide crucial teaching moments for other users, it’s a process that wobbles between constructive analysis and leveling blame on people who just died, when loved ones and survivors are still grieving.

But the reaction to Castle Peak introduced something new; a generation-defining avalanche picked apart by thousands of bystanders and click-hungry content creators on social media.

Adam Ü speaks with a calm intensity. Even when talking about being buried in an avalanche.

“None of us but the six survivors were there,” the long-time professional skier says of the Castle Peak avalanche, never breaking gaze behind his thick-rimmed black glasses.

“I’ve had some conversations with one of the survivors and it’s been really intriguing. I haven’t asked a single thing about their decision making. And it’s been helpful for both me and the survivor,” Ü continues. “Now we’re members of this really shitty exclusive club that I don’t think anyone’s really going to truly understand until they’re there. And you never want to have to be there.”

In January of 2023, Ü was on assignment in Japan for Mountain Gazette with photographer Grant Gunderson and well-known Tahoe skier Kyle Smaine, skiing the backcountry above Tsugaike. On a pleasant and windy off day, the trio ascended a highpoint called Kamijo. After assessing the snowpack they discussed the safest options and decided to descend. Smaine would lead. “You can feel the ice at first, but it’s smooth and really good!” Ü recalled Smaine saying over the radio from the bottom of the slope. Ü skied next, then Gunderson. They reconvened at the bottom and “agreed that it was a perfect line on which to end the trip,” Ü would later write in Mountain Gazette.

The three then ascended the ridge separating them from Tsugaike. Gunderson decided to return to town, while Ü and Smaine chose to again climb to the top of Kamijo. There they met three Austrians readying to ski the peak. Ü and Smaine skied the line they had before, and as they prepared to ski out, stood at the bottom of the slope in their boots and watched the Austrian group ski. The first skier, a man named Christoph Schöfegger, skied the run and stopped next to Smaine and Ü. As the second skier descended, the slope gave way. “I still didn’t think the slide would reach us where we were standing,” Ü wrote in Mountain Gazette. “But when I saw the avalanche step down and propagate widely mid-slope, I put my camera back in my open pack and said, ‘we gotta move.’”

The avalanche swept down the mountain, carrying the second Austrian skier, burying him, as well as Smaine, Schöfegger, and Ü. Ü would spend twenty-five minutes buried under five feet of snow before he was extricated. Smaine and Schöfegger would not survive.

Years later, Gunderson would recount the ordeal in his Instagram post made after the Castle Peak avalanche. “After our accident in Japan a few years ago, it was brutal watching media show up before meaningful rescue help,” Gunderson wrote. “The next day, Adam Ü and I spent hours being interrogated—trying to explain avalanches to people who don’t understand the mountains. Some of the hardest moments of my life came from that experience.” (Gunderson did not respond to requests for further comment.)

Avalanche accidents had been discussed online before. The 2012 Tunnel Creek avalanche—which took three lives and involved a slew of pro skiers and industry leaders—was analyzed at length on sites like Teton Gravity Research and fledgling social media outlets like Instagram and Twitter. What’s different now is the scale.

Weeks went by, and Tahoe received more snow, then rain as spring came closer. And Castle Peak remained the focus of headlines and social media feeds. Nine skiers and guides had died. Two survivors of the incident were interviewed by The New York Times, and spoke of the moments that led up to the incident, the desperate effort to dig out the victims, and the gutting decision to stop.

On March 4th, The Atlantic ran a lengthy article on the incident, Joshua Partlow’s “California’s Deadliest Avalanche Turned on One Choice,” a well-sourced retelling of the events that wrestled with the complicated nature of the incident. “The people who live here, who love these mountains, know even small mistakes can be unforgiving,” Partlow wrote. “And they know why people take those risks anyway.”

That did little to keep the article out of the crossfire.

“Clickbait monopolizing on a tragedy, disappointing journalism,” one user commented on an Instagram feed post of the article. Another lampooned the magazine for covering a subculture it rarely did. “I def look to the Atlantic for all my skiing related news…,” the user commented. Others pointed out that the article’s title image showed not the backcountry skiing gear the victims would have used, but resort equipment.

Other creators faced a more forgiving audience. Best-selling self-help writer Jamie Wheal posted on the topic just two days after the accident—and before the bodies of the deceased could be removed from the site—noting that he wanted to “share some broader thoughts on risky decision making in complex situations—using backcountry skiing as a lens to unpack how we messy humans, in so many domains of our lives, from geopolitics, to vaccine policies to business decisions to unsafe sex or substance use—all fall into the same traps.”

Wheal used the incident to discuss leadership and business strategy through Ian McCammon’s recreational safety-oriented F.A.C.E.T.S. heuristic study. Unlike the reactions The Atlantic endured, not one comment on Wheal’s Substack or Instagram posts questioned his authority to discuss the topic.

All as others hoped the discussion would simply end. “Can you please stop?” one comment read on the NY Pulse post. “Let the families have some peace.”

Cassidy Randall took her time before she posted to her Substack on March 18th, 2026. “After the Tahoe avalanche, it took me a long time to read the coverage of it. As a skier, I knew it would be devastating,” Randall wrote below an image of four ski tourers entering the shadow of a rugged peak. “Of course it was—but not just for the tragedy and loss and grief. So much of the coverage was dripping in judgment for the actions that led to those skiers being killed. And little of it seemed to offer empathy for those who survived.”

The award-winning Randall had previously reported on the often invisible plight of avalanche survivors in her Adventure Journal piece “The Reckoning.” And in the wake of the Castle Peak avalanche, Randall reposted the article. Within she had interviewed Durango, Colorado-based therapist Jennifer Fiebig, amongst the first clinicians to focus on outdoor trauma.

“There’s a culture of analyzing all the data after an accident that takes the humanity out of the survivors,” Randall quoted Fiebig. “They’re already thinking ‘I killed my friend’ or going through other grief, and then descending into a shame spiral on top of that. We need to know what happened, but we also need to make that space for the survivor to feel cared for, to feel validated that they did the best they could do, and recognize the pain that they just went through.”

Avalanche accidents had been discussed from the distance of the internet before. The 2012 Tunnel Creek avalanche—which took three lives and involved a slew of pro skiers and industry leaders—was analyzed at length on sites like Teton Gravity Research and fledgling social media outlets like Instagram and Twitter.

What’s different now is the scale. According to the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch, more than half of Americans get their news from social media, compared to roughly 25% in 2012. Sites like Instagram and Facebook have become indispensable to people in a way they weren’t fifteen years ago. And Tunnel Creek was the subject of articles like Matt Hansen’s ambitious POWDER feature “Nature’s Feedback,” and John Branch’s Pulitzer and Peabody-winning “Snow Fall.” Castle Peak has been examined in similar ways, with more reflections surely to come. But so far, social media posts and reactions have been the main platform for discussing the tragedy, even being the lens many viewed long-form journalism through.

“Blaming sort of implies that those who are judging and blaming wouldn’t make the same mistake, or any mistake,” Adam Ü in a courtesy photo.

Weeks after Castle Peak, Adam Ü is seated in a dining room brightly lit by the April sun. A print of two shaded sailboats approaching a break in the clouds rests on the wall just behind him. And he talks about how he has inadvertently become a central figure in the quiet, often unnoticed world of avalanche incident survivors. “One of the things I’ve realized is that even in instances like the six survivors from [Castle Peak], all six of them are going to have different trajectories in their healing journey,” he says. “And every single one of those trajectories is 100% valid, totally okay and correct for that person.” So far, most of the survivors of Castle Peak have declined to comment on the incident.

While the discussion on Castle Peak was often reactionary, Ü thinks the discourse around avalanche incidents has improved within the skiing community. “I think there’s just been more awareness,” he says. “More and more people are getting into avalanche courses, reading about these things, learning about human factors, and possibly being more self-aware.”

Still, Ü feels progress has only gone so far, especially in post-accident criticism. “Holding anyone to the standard of perfection 100% of the time is unrealistic. Nobody is perfect,” Ü says. “Blaming sort of implies that those who are judging and blaming wouldn’t make the same mistake, or any mistake.”

Ü becomes animated when the conversation turns to forums and message boards, especially those focused on Blackbird Mountain Guides, the company that led the group at Castle Peak. Their role in the incident has been debated at length. “One of the things that was covered in the course I took with [author, guide, and avalanche survivor] Ken Wylie was that, when it comes to post-incident analysis, we can either blame or we can learn. If we do the former, we lose the ability to do the latter,” he says. “There were/are a ton of comments from longtime mountain folk that are looking to blame Blackbird, string-‘em-up or lock-‘em-up and throw-away-the-key type stuff. That’s not helpful at all in my opinion.”

And Ü sees the broader culture as mostly incapable of understanding recreational and professional risk-taking.

“After my incident in Japan, I want to say it was the Today Show or Good Morning America or one of those big bobble-headed-pundit-morning-show type things called me was like ‘hey, we’d love to talk to you,” he says holding a hypothetical phone to his ear before abruptly hanging it up.

“I’m happy to talk to mountain people about it because I think mountain people have a better understanding,” Ü says intently. “But I’m not going to expose myself to someone who has never set foot in mountains because they’ll have no idea why mountain people like to be in the mountains.”

Random posters with few followers had arrived at a discussion as complicated as the Castle Peak avalanche on the same platform as leaders and experts. Highly regarded magazines and newspapers were subject to derision from skiers. The thread running through it all was reaction.

And that may be how these incidents are absorbed in the future. Even with multitudes of ski-specific publications and avalanche safety advocates making note of the tragedy, the discussion was framed by those who posted fiery opinions, or read them. All at a scale that an avalanche accident had never before been subject to, trading a more thoughtful discourse for the immediacy—and reactivity—of the internet.

Still, those who have experienced these incidents sit above the cacophony of social media and quick-hit news. And offer a perspective that trades in experience over certainty.

“Like I said, it’s my experience,” Adam Ü says. “And it may not be applicable to the person sitting next to me.”