The founder of the guiding company facing a criminal investigation after deadly Lake Tahoe avalanche is a highly accomplished skier and mountaineer with two summits of Mt. Everest under his belt.
Zeb Blais, who founded Truckee, Calif.-based Blackbird Mountain Guides in 2020, has been a mountain guide for more thantwo decades.
His company led a doomed tour group that saw eight of its members killed and one presumed dead in the avalanche Tuesday at Castle Peak, including a six “supermoms” and three guides.
The state and local police are probing Blackbird to determine any negligence after the group set out in dangerous conditions, even warning the day prior of a “BIG storm” in a social media clip that featured a guide sifting through a weak layer of snow potentially prone to avalanches.
Blais himself is no stranger to disaster.
He said he caught in an avalanche in Tajikistan after he and his team grew “impatient” crossing a glacier they knew had “unstable” snow, he explained in a2021 podcast interview.
Blais said his group exhibited poor judgement and called it “one of the biggest learning experiences of my career” after snow buried the thrill-seeker and he needed to be rescued.
“I don’t care where you are, you just don’t want to get caught in a real avalanche. Yeah it was for me, it was a huge shift, and just like, yeah, this can happen to you,” he said.
Blais has reached some of the world’s tallest and most perilous peaks, including Everest, Cho Oyu and Lobuche in the Himalayas, according to his bio on Blackbird’swebsite. He’s summited other famed mountains, from Argentina’s Aconcagua and Alaska’s Denali to Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn in the Alps, as well as skiiing six of the seven continents.
Blais is also a licensed “avalanche blaster,” meaning he’s authorized to trigger explosives to clear unstable snow that could lead to avalanches, according to his LinkedIn page.
Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos
