TRUCKEE – The names of the victims came out a few at a time. With each release came another ripple of recognition for the residents of this mountain town reeling from the deadly Castle Peak avalanche – another friend of a friend, another family suddenly at the center of it.

“It’s a small town – everyone is one degree of separation from this accident,” said Kelly Gove, a Truckee resident and mother. “We all feel like it could have been any of us.”

In the days since nine backcountry skiers in a tour group were killed in an avalanche near Frog Lake, Truckee has been grappling not only with that loss, but with a familiar, uneasy truth of mountain life: What draws people here also carries risks that can turn catastrophic in an instant.

“The reason we all live here is for the beauty of the mountains and the majesty of the snow,” said Austin Harrington, a snowboarder and owner of the Craft & Logic Taproom in downtown Truckee. “The things we all cherish and love are also what created this tragedy.”

Tahoe is no stranger to avalanches, with fatal slides in six of the past 10 years. But nothing in recent memory matched the scale of Tuesday’s collapse on the 15 skiers traveling with Blackbird Mountain Guides, six of whom survived.

The Blackbird skiers weren’t the only deaths to rattle the Tahoe area last week. On Thursday, the Tahoe Nordic Search and Rescue Team recovered the body of a 21-year-old skier at the Northstar ski resort, just south of downtown Truckee. And at Heavenly Ski Resort outside of South Lake Tahoe, two men, ages 33 and 58, died Friday in separate ski incidents.

Interviews around the Tahoe area in the days after the tragedy reveal a profound sadness among the locals. Truckee is a small community of just 17,000 residents. Even those who didn’t know someone who died knew someone who was involved in the rescue effort or the emergency response.

They’ve also had little time to grieve. The same storm that set the conditions for the deadly avalanche also delivered fresh powder, drawing one of the busiest weekends that Truckee has seen this year. Just as locals were beginning to learn the names of the deceased, Truckee began to fill up with out-of-towners.

On Saturday morning, traffic backed up nearly 5 miles toward Northstar California Resort. Across from the Castle Peak trailhead – closed since the slide – skiers waited in long lift lines at Boreal Mountain, and in the parking lot, friends sat in open car trunks passing around beers in the afternoon sun.

In downtown Truckee, Harrington had offered up his bar as a space for those looking to grieve on Sunday before a community vigil. But by the afternoon, that sorrow was bumping up against the tourist crowd coming in off the slopes. Harrington navigated between both – saying hello to cheery visitors clapping him on the back while carrying a beer to a local there to talk about a friend he had lost in the avalanche.

“Visitors still want to live their lives,” Harrington said. “We in the hospitality business have to keep a smile on our face and just keep chugging along.”

Guides in Tahoe were also hit hard by the news. Three of the victims were guides with Blackbird, a Truckee company that runs tours worldwide. Although Zeb Blais, Blackbird’s owner, has not agreed to any interviews, his company issued a statement after Nevada County released the names of the guides who died.

“We hold each individual and their loved ones in our hearts,” it read. “We are heartbroken with everyone who is grieving during this profoundly difficult time.”

Many questions are still swirling around the decisions that led to the group to venture out in the middle of last week’s storm. Local and state authorities are also opening investigations into whether criminal negligence was involved.

Some online have already jumped to conclusions, assigning blame to Blackbird. The company’s Instagram posts have turned into a venue for debate, with comments dissecting the guides’ choices leading up to the tragedy.

Locals say that the rush to judgement has only compounded the pain.

“If you weren’t there making those decisions, you probably shouldn’t voice your opinion on it,” Harrington said. “There’s no blame to be placed – there’s just always a risk.”

For those who don’t trek in the backcountry, the obvious question lingers: Why take the risk in the first place?

But here in Truckee, that’s hardly a question. The love of the mountains is a powerful force. Most who live here are transplants who have  uprooted their lives from elsewhere to live and recreate among the mountains. The devotion to the backcountry is a part of their identity that can’t be shaken.

At the Johnson’s Valley trailhead Sunday morning, several groups of backcountry skiers were starting up the mountain, unable to let a sunny day escape them. Still, the reminders of avalanche risk were unignorable: Each skier entering the trail passed an electric sign that blinked green to show their avalanche beacon was working to transmit a signal in case they encountered one.

Mary and Tom Meagher, who live just outside of Truckee, had spent the previous evening checking the weather and avalanche reports. When they set out Sunday morning, they deliberately chose routes that wouldn’t be steep enough to slide.

“I feel like people in my circle have been less stoked to get out and go skiing this weekend,” said Mary, 34. “It’s been an unfortunate reminder of the consequences.”

The avalanche was also at the top of mind for Rick Reed, a 42-year-old skier from Reno.

“When a tragedy like this happens, it definitely makes you reconsider and weigh risk versus reward,” Reed said. “There’s an inherent risk to everything that we do. But I think that there’s a difference between the inherent risk and putting yourself in a situation that might be questionable.”

Still, even Reed had shown up to the trailhead that morning with a dying battery on his avalanche beacon, earning him a scolding from his ski partner.

Others carried on more lightly. Courtney and Jeff Barrett drove up from Sacramento with their family for a winter picnic in a meadow near the trailhead – an annual tradition with their grandchildren. Their truck bed was packed with plastic toboggans and a metal bowl for making ice cream in the snow.

“We’d considered not coming up here because of what happened,” Courtney said. “We had heard locals might not want too many tourists in town.”

On Sunday night, on a block usually filled with tourists, the locals gathered for the community vigil. Volunteers from the church handed out cups of hot cocoa and candles.

“This past week has broken our hearts in more ways than one,” Vice Mayor Courtney Henderson said to open the vigil. “The light doesn’t mean the darkness is gone – it just means that we refuse to stand in the dark alone.”

Even after the candles had been extinguished, a mass of people remained in the cold, hugging and crying.

A young ski instructor at Northstar stood toward the back of the crowd, watching as people knelt before nine memorial posts that had been erected.

“We lose a couple of people each year, but it’s never been like this,” he said, not bothering to wipe away tears. “Make this town make sense.”

Some in Tahoe are making sense of the loss the only way they know how – by returning to the backcountry.

On Friday, Tahoe ski photographer Lenny Truong posted a photo on Instagram from a summit overlooking Lake Tahoe, the sun radiating over a slope of sparkling, untouched snow.

“I think this is what they would’ve wanted – us out here in the mountains on a classic blue bird pow day, frothing,” Truong wrote. “They wouldn’t have wanted us to stay home, to give up on the dream. … To go forward into the mountains is to honor their memories.”

This article originally published at For Tahoe residents drawn to ‘majesty’ of mountains, deadly avalanche a stark reminder of danger.