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Frustrated with crowded resorts, more skiers risk avalanche hazards in backcountry
MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. — On a clear, cold day in mid-February, we had spent hours on backcountry skis trudging up and across a remote mountainside in the eastern Sierra when we noticed that the trees directly above us were much smaller than the others we had passed along the way.
Still panting from the workout, I looked down the steep slope — something I had carefully avoided up to that point — and saw more suspiciously small trees stretching below us.
“Avalanche,” said my ski partner, Howie Schwartz, a veteran backcountry guide. “Huge one, back in the ’80s, reached all the way down to the valley.”
Schwartz demonstrates how to use probes designed to punch holes in avalanche debris to make contact with a buried ski partner.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
To his trained eye, the nearly vertical strip of new growth was a telling sign that we were slogging across the high-alpine version of a bowling alley. On the wrong day, tons of snow piled on the ridge a thousand feet above could release without warning and crash down like a wave that, instead of washing over us, would bury us and quickly solidify into the consistency of concrete.
The odds were firmly in our favor that day: There had been no new snow recently or abrupt changes in the temperature. Still, it was best to not linger, Schwartz said, with a nod to make sure I followed him across to the taller trees.
Avalanches are an unavoidable fact of life in the mountains. Two days after our trip, following a storm that dumped 6 feet of snow in 36 hours, a pair of ski patrollers were caught in an avalanche at nearby Mammoth Mountain resort. One was extracted without serious injury; the other was hospitalized but did not survive.
On the same day, two small avalanches struck at Palisades Tahoe. Nobody was injured, but a year ago four people were trapped and one died in an avalanche at the resort.
As shocking and sad as those cases are, they happened on some of the most aggressively protected slopes in the world. Large commercial ski resorts such as Mammoth and Palisades employ patrol teams that go out every morning before the lifts open to test the stability of the snowpack.
A growing number of skiers are seeking out backcountry slopes, trading the relative safety of crowded resorts for the silence and solitude of untrammeled runs.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
If anything looks suspicious, they deliberately trigger avalanches — using explosives for big stashes of snow, using their skis and body weight for smaller ones — in the hope that no unexpected slides will occur when paying customers are enjoying themselves downhill.
But if things can go wrong at carefully managed resorts, imagine how much risk there is in the backcountry where nobody patrols, cellphone signals are spotty and, even if you can make a call, help might take hours to reach you.
On Monday, a 46-year-old backcountry skier was killed in an avalanche just south of Lake Tahoe. Due to what deputies called “extremely hazardous” conditions, it took an El Dorado County search-and-rescue team more than 24 hours to retrieve the body. They had to use explosives to set off avalanches in the area before it was safe for them to go in, according to a sheriff’s department post on Facebook.
In the last decade, at least 245 people in the U.S. have been killed by avalanches — the vast majority in the backcountry, according to data compiled by the Colorado Avalanche Information Center and the U.S. Forest Service. Some victims were hikers and snowmobilers, but more than half were skiers.
That’s a shocking number given how small the community of hardcore backcountry skiers is. Seemingly everyone who makes the sport a significant part of their lives has lost at least one friend to an avalanche.
“I know of far, far too many who have died,” said Schwartz, 52, who has been guiding professionally for three decades and helped design the curriculum for the country’s most commonly taught avalanche training course. “The longer you do this, the more people you know who die, even professionals, even other guides.”
Schwartz, left, and Dolan install climbing skins, synthetic material that makes it possible to climb to the top of a run wearing backcountry skis.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Despite the obvious risks, there has been a steady rise in the number of people heading to the backcountry to “earn their turns” in recent years. There was a surge 2020 after ski resorts shut down due to COVID-19, said Steve Mace, director of the Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center, which publishes daily updates on the weather and avalanche risk in California’s high country.
But the number of backcountry skiers didn’t plummet after the pandemic emergency ended, Mace said. One reason is the eye-opening cost of lift tickets: A single day of skiing at Mammoth can cost as much as $219 this season. Another is the crowds: Despite the high cost, standing in a lift line on a holiday weekend can feel a lot like staring at taillights in rush hour on the 405 Freeway.
And then there is the resort vibe. When 19th century California naturalist John Muir famously said, “The mountains are calling and I must go,” he couldn’t possibly have imagined slushy parking lots crowded with Teslas and short tempers, or bars selling $15 beers.
The allure — some would say siren song — of the backcountry is the absence of everything resorts represent.
Even on the most hectic days within the boundaries of Mammoth Mountain, the untouched, unnamed slopes nearby offer precious silence and solitude. With no ski lifts you have to work a lot harder, but there’s something purifying in the effort it takes to climb hundreds of vertical feet to reach the top of a perfect line. The descent through unimaginably light, untracked powder is the reward.
On a good day — with a knowledgeable partner and the avalanche odds in your favor — all it costs is a few calories and a bit of sweat.
“The longer you do this, the more people you know who die, even professionals, even other guides,” Schwartz says of backcountry skiing.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
With all of that in mind, Schwartz and I drove to the end of Old Mammoth Road on a recent weekday, where the gleaming vacation homes end and the landscape turns steeply up toward the Sierra crest.
We glued “skins” to the bottoms of our skis, synthetic material that allows the skis to glide forward through the snow but stops them from sliding backward, making uphill travel possible. We clicked into bindings that held only our toes in place for the uphill, and then, with a quick adjustment, locked our heels in place for the downhill run.
The temperature was well below freezing, but we left most of our layers in our backpacks, because the uphill portion would be an intense workout. We didn’t want to get soaked in sweat on the way up only to freeze on the way down.
Our safety gear included avalanche beacons, devices about the size of an old Blackberry that can send and receive electronic signals. We strapped them to our chests so that if one of us got buried in an avalanche, the other would, theoretically, be able to find the beacon.
We also had probes: long, thin sticks that unfold like tent poles and are designed to punch holes in avalanche debris to make contact with a buried partner. You hope you don’t poke someone in the eye, but if you’re using one, it’s a life-or-death emergency, so it’s no time to be squeamish. We also had collapsible shovels to help us dig if we were lucky enough to find our friend.
We pulled out all the gear and tested it at the bottom of the hill, an exercise that was more sobering than reassuring. Every step in the search-and-rescue process would take time, and someone buried in snow is likely to suffocate within minutes. It became obvious that the best way to stay safe in the backcountry would be to avoid having to use the emergency gear altogether.
Avalanche beacons transmit electronic signals that can help rescuers locate a skier buried in an avalanche.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
That’s harder than it sounds. Predicting whether a snowy hillside might slide depends on a dizzying array of factors, most of which are not obvious to the naked eye. For example, avalanches usually occur on slopes with a 30-degree to 45-degree angle. I’ve been skiing, hiking and climbing for nearly four decades, and I can tell you if something is steep, but the mathematical degree of its slope? I have no idea.
Another crucial factor is the way snow is layered. Think of it like a cake. Some storms are warm and wet, like frosting; others are cold and dry, like crumbly pastry. If a firm layer is resting on top of a weak layer, that’s a recipe for disaster. But it’s difficult to know without encyclopedic knowledge of the season’s weather in that precise location, or digging a deep pit and carefully examining each striation — like performing a bit of impromptu archaeology before your workout.
“If I were going to tell you one thing that really gets my hackles up, it’s a persistent weak layer,” said Mace, the avalanche forecaster. All the other dangers are relatively short-lived. New snow from a storm settles pretty quickly, for example. But a weak layer buried underneath the surface can last for months.
That’s where the Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center website comes in. It provides a color-coded scale of the threat level that takes into account recent weather, the nature of the terrain and the likely consistency of the layers lurking beneath the surface.
Mace, 37, worked for years as a ski patroller and mountain guide before taking on the avalanche forecasting duties at the Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center. Despite the risks, he does almost all of his skiing in the backcountry.
“It brings me a lot of joy and peace. I love the uphill as much as the down,” he said. But Mace, too, said he has seen his share of tragedy. “I have been in this field a long time, and I have lost a lot of friends, people I loved.”
The most valuable lesson he has learned is patience. If he sees a particularly pretty line of snow carving down through some rocks, like an elegant white necklace, he doesn’t just throw on his skis, trudge up the hill and charge down, the way he did in his 20s.
These days, he studies the slope, like a gem cutter before lifting his saw. He watches the weather, assesses the layers and waits for the perfect dusting of powder. He accepts that it might take years for the stars to align.
“It’s a very harsh learning environment,” Mace said, with lots of unreliable “positive feedback.” You might ski something steep and wonderful, where nothing goes wrong, and think you’ve figured things out, he said.
“But there are a million reasons why an avalanche might not release” on any given day, Mace said. “It may not be that you made good choices; it may be that you just got lucky.”
Both Mace and Schwartz said it can be hard to find the right tone when offering advice to new backcountry skiers. They don’t want to underplay the dangers, but they also don’t want to discourage someone from pursuing what, for them, has become a passion.
“What you see more often than not,” Schwartz said, “is that people know what they’re doing is dangerous. They know there’s a mortal risk. But they do it anyway.”
I struggled, mightily, as Schwartz and I continued up and across the rugged slope. I’m a confident resort skier, but it was my first time in the backcountry and the unmanicured conditions proved tougher than I expected.
Wind had scoured away most of the powdery snow, and rain had left a slick, brittle crust. I grunted and cursed trying to get the unfamiliar skis to go where I pointed them. Schwartz smiled patiently and said the snow was “a little grabby,” anyone would struggle with it.
He didn’t, though.
When we finally approached the taller trees, the crunch-crunch of every stride grew steadily softer. There, sheltered beneath the branches of the towering pines, the snow was untouched, like a hillside covered in a foot and a half of down feathers.
Schwartz grinned and said, “This is it, man, this is why we’re here.”
With no ski lifts, backcountry skiers have to work a lot harder, often climbing hundreds of vertical feet to reach the top of a perfect line.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
He reminded me to wait for him to get a good distance ahead. That way, if one of us kicked off an avalanche, we’d be far enough apart that it probably wouldn’t swallow us both, leaving one guy free to rescue the other.
And then he turned his skis parallel with the fall line, gathered some speed and started making effortless bouncy turns through the trees. The snow was so soft, he floated hundreds of feet to the valley floor in perfect silence.
Well, almost perfect. I could hear him laughing.
Google took internet searches to the next level. Could it do the same for mosquito control?
The Silicon Valley-based tech giant is seeking to release up to 64 million sterilized male mosquitoes in California and Florida over two years, according to a notice in the Federal Register. It’s part of an ambitious effort to curb the diseases the insects spread.
Google says it can harness technology to optimize a concept that’s been around for decades, but hasn’t been successfully scaled with mosquitoes to rein in disease.
For example, the process often involves separating the insects by sex to isolate the males. Currently, that’s done manually and can be time consuming. Google says it’s “developing new technologies that combine sensors, algorithms and novel engineering to take advantage of unique aspects of mosquito biology to quickly and accurately sort males from females.”
The company also says it’s building software and monitoring tools to guide releases of sterile males, and its scientists and engineers are creating sensors, traps and software to decide which areas need to be treated and treated again.
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Called Debug, the project targets Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which are native to Africa but have infiltrated nearly half of California’s counties since first being detected in the state in 2013. Not only do they drive residents nuts with itchy bites, but they can carry a number of potentially serious diseases, including dengue, Zika, chikungunya and yellow fever.
The plan is to infect males — which don’t bite — with a bacteria called Wolbachia, which effectively renders them sterile. They are then released to seek out wild females and mate. Females will lay eggs but these won’t hatch, which experts say drives down the population over time.
There are other methods to sterilize male mosquitoes. Vector control districts serving Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties have irradiated males and released them in recent years.
Early results are promising. Two neighborhoods treated by the Greater Los Angeles Vector Control District saw a more than 80% reduction in the female Aedes aegypti population in 2024 and 2025.
But as the Greater L.A. district seeks to expand its operations, cost poses a problem. Last year, business owners signaled they weren’t willing to shell out more every year to make it happen. District officials are still hoping to sway them.
If Google moves forward, it wouldn’t be the first time it has been involved in such an effort. In 2018, the company conducted a large-scale trial in Fresno County, releasing 14.4 million Wolbachia-infected males in three neighborhoods.
“At peak mosquito season, the number of female mosquitoes was 95.5% lower in release areas compared to non-release areas, with the most geographically isolated neighborhood reaching a 99% reduction,” a 2020 paper reported.
Google has applied for a permit from the Environmental Protection Agency to carry out the releases in California and Florida, for which the federal agency is currently seeking comments before deciding whether to grant approval.
The company aims to release up to 16 million Wolbachia-infected males in California, and the same in Florida, per year for two years, the Federal Register announcement said, for a total of 64 million.
Urgency to tamp down the invasive mosquito population in California has increased since 2023, when the state logged its first locally acquired dengue cases — meaning people were infected in their communities, not while traveling. The following year, the number of locally acquired cases ballooned to 18, with 14 of them in Los Angeles County.
A study published last week in “The Lancet Regional Health — Americas” found that approximately 18.2 million Californians — primarily in the Central Valley, L.A. and San Diego areas — live in regions where conditions are probably suitable for local dengue transmission.
“Under moderate scenarios of climate warming and urban expansion, an additional 4.1 million residents may be at risk by mid-century,” according to the study led by UC Berkeley’s Lisa Couper. Researchers note the current and future risk of transmission remains low except during summer in the Central Valley and Southern California.
“I’m pretty much in favor of whichever [sterile insect technique] approach gets us the disease prevention and nuisance control we need and at the lowest price,” Susanne Kluh, general manager of the Greater L.A. County Vector Control District, said in an email.
She said her district went with radiation because it was the only approved technique when they wanted to launch their pilot, and that it’s “also the only one where some company does not make a profit in the middle.” However, she wouldn’t rule out using Wolbachia if it turned out to be the most affordable option.
Residents of Monterey Park voted overwhelmingly to ban data centers on election day, making the San Gabriel Valley city the first in the nation to do so by public vote.
As of Wednesday, 86% of votes were in favor of Measure NDC, the city ban, according to the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk.
Other cities and towns have passed moratoriums on data centers, as a wave of opposition sweeps the country. But the Monterey Park vote can only be overturned by another ballot measure, making it the most permanent data center ban in a jurisdiction.
Monterey Park’s City Council had already banned data centers by ordinance, after a proposed 247,000-square-foot data center met an outpouring of public anger and concern. The developer withdrew that plan.
That facility would have been less than 500 feet away from the nearest home, and would have used three times the electricity of the entire 60,000-person city. Residents said it would have caused noise and air pollution and driven up electricity rates.
“This ensures long-lasting protections for current and future generations,” Amy Wong, co-founder of the group San Gabriel Valley Progressive Action, said of the vote. “It means that future city councils cannot overturn a data center ban, even if data center developers wanted to spend money to fund pro-data center candidates.”
The measure had no formal opposition. The developer of the proposed facility, investment firm HMC StratCap, said it wouldn’t engage in the ballot fight when it withdrew in March.
The Data Center Coalition, an industry trade group, expressed disappointment in the vote.
“It sends a signal that the area is closed for business, both for data centers and for other significant economic development projects,” state policy director Khara Boender said.
“It deprives local residents of the opportunity to compete for jobs and investment, while also causing the area to relinquish substantial long-term economic investment, high-wage jobs, and critical tax revenue to neighboring areas or other states.”
SGV Progressive Action worked with hyperlocal groups including No Data Center Monterey Park to rally support for the measure.
The group is now focused on stopping data center proposals in the City of Industry and fighting a move by City of Industry, Santa Fe Springs, Vernon and City of Commerce to welcome data centers and other industry with fast-tracked permitting and tax incentives.
City of Industry, in the San Gabriel Valley, and Vernon, south of downtown L.A., are primarily industrial areas, each with around 300 permanent residents. They are employment centers, and tens of thousands of workers commute in daily.
There has been little vocal opposition to data centers among the few residents of these cities. Wong said the protest is primarily coming from the surrounding neighborhoods.
“If a data center gets built in City of Industry, residents across the region would bear the brunt of pollution and increased utility costs,” Wong said, noting that it is surrounded by 16 other cities and unincorporated communities.
Data center proposals have been limited in California compared to Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois and Arizona, which sit at the center of a recent boom in hyperscaler facilities to power artificial intelligence.
California has the third-most data centers in the country, with 300, but high electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in other hotspots.
That doesn’t mean opposition hasn’t been fierce. In Coachella and Imperial County, residents are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.
In the San Gabriel Valley, Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoriums, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update.
Wong said she hoped the ballot measure vote would galvanize the opposition. “The vote is a testament to the people power of our region,” she said. “Our region is worth protecting, and we won’t let data centers determine our future.”
A rule intended to prevent rent gouging in the wake of the Eaton and Palisades fires has lapsed in Los Angeles County, possibly exposing some renters to hikes.
The executive order that blocked rent increases was issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom amid the devastating wildfires last year. Under the order, landlords couldn’t increase rents by more than 10% above their prefire levels.
The rule, which was supposed to be temporary and was repeatedly extended, ended Friday after a vote to extend it again failed to garner enough votes. Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, sounded the alarm in a motion to extend price protections that failed to pass at the Board of Supervisors’ May 19 meeting.
“These price gouging protections continue to be necessary as construction and rebuilding continue, and as thousands of people remain displaced,” the motion said. “Families which signed short-term leases could face drastic price increases of 50% or more without further price gouging protection.”
Los Angeles County is home to more than 1 million rental properties, though not all of them needed protection from the new rule. There are already stricter rent increase caps for many residences, depending on the location, type and age of the building. Despite the rent control in the region, the people of Los Angeles pay among the highest rents in the country.
It is uncertain whether renters will face rapidly rising rents now that the protection has lapsed. But some real estate experts and policymakers said there was no need for the temporary rule that was part of the governor’s state of emergency.
Supervisors Kathryn Barger, Janice Hahn and Holly Mitchell abstained from voting on the motion to extend the protection, while Supervisors Hilda Solis and Horvath supported it.
“I abstained because I did not see sufficient evidence to justify extending this emergency ordinance, nor did I see evidence to eliminate it entirely,” Hahn said.
Barger’s office said she supported allowing the protections to sunset while waiting to see whether new information emerged.
“Market data already shows countywide rents are only about 2% above pre-emergency levels and rental inventory has grown,” Barger representative Helen E. Chavez Garcia said. “The Supervisor is also mindful of the burden these ongoing protections place on small property owners throughout the county.”
Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
There haven’t been steep rent hikes in neighborhoods within three miles of the Palisades fire, according to a Times analysis of data from Zillow, the property listing company.
In ZIP Codes within three miles of the Palisades fire, rent increased 4.8% from December 2024 to April 2025. In areas around the Eaton fire, which destroyed swaths of Altadena, rent jumped 5.2% in the same period.
In L.A. County, ZIP Codes farther from the fires saw only about a 2% increase.
A landlords representative, Jesus Rojas of the Apartment Owners Assn. of Greater Los Angeles, told the supervisors during public comment at the meeting that the county’s rent-gouging rules have “long outlived the emergency they were intended to address” and are now being “wrongfully used to harm thousands of rental housing providers throughout the county.”
“There is no proof that multifamily rental housing providers are hugely increasing rents for impacted homeowners,” Rojas said.
Indeed, there are strong signs that the property market in the Los Angeles area has at last begun to cool.
L.A. metro-area rent prices recently fell to a four-year low, with the median rent slipping to $2,167 in December.
Meanwhile, condominium sales had their slowest start of the year in decades. Condo sales in Los Angeles have plummeted to a 20-year low, with fewer than 2,000 units sold in January and February — the worst start to the year since 2005.
Newsom defended the price-gouging protections shortly after they went into effect.
“In the days following the Los Angeles firestorms, we worked quickly to protect Los Angeles survivors from any form of exploitation,” he said in February 2025. “The state has the tools in place to not only block price gouging during this emergency, but also to prosecute bad actors.”
The Los Angeles County Department of Consumer and Business Affairs said it received more than 2,000 complaints after the fires, alleging that retailers and landlords were taking advantage of people put in hardship by their losses, and sent out more than 2,000 cease-and-desist letters to businesses and landlords for alleged price gouging, said Morine Merritt, who oversees department investigations into consumer and real estate fraud.
“Close to 90% of the complaints that we received involved allegations of rent increases,” Merritt said in an interview. Now that the fire-related protections have expired, existing laws and “regular market conditions determine price increases for goods and services, including rents,” she said.
Crackdowns on fire-related rent gouging have been rare, said Chelsea Kirk of the activist organization the Rent Brigade, which analyzed L.A. County’s rental market in the year after the fires. It reported 18,360 potential examples of price gouging in listings but said that few lawsuits had been filed by authorities so far.
Last week, Rent Brigade announced what it said was the first private civil lawsuit brought by a family that claimed to be rent-gouged in the aftermath of the wildfires. Plaintiffs Randall and Candy Renick, whose Altadena home was damaged, said they were charged nearly three times the maximum permitted rate for nearly 10 months. They seek restitution of $96,000 plus civil penalties and attorneys’ fees.
The rental market has probably stabilized since the fires, Kirk said, but other families may still be “locked into illegal rents” that they agreed to pay when they were in a rush to find housing after they were displaced.
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