Everything’s Bigger in Tahoe

But, the sludge fell, and they got stuck on the shores of a small lake now named for them. “I ate my parents, and all I got was this stupid lake,” a novelty t shirt might read.

I skinned up the trail at the front of the pack, shoulder-to-shoulder with Sammy, the group’s guide. Sammy had been born somewhere around LA and had moved to Tahoe 7 or 8 years ago to guide in the backcountry. As I was the only person who showed up stag for the AIARE 1, it was socially acceptable for me to play teacher’s pet. The two of us chatted about California, moving at a conversational pace.

We talked about how big and spread out it was, how I had never seen so many individual homes as when I looked up at the hills on the way into town from SFO the first time I visited. In New York, I swore, there are many more people, but we all live in tidy terrariums, stacked one atop another.

The Wednesday prior, we held an informational Zoom to review the pre-learning and basics of avalanche safety. We covered what AIARE stands for, and that this course is backcountry skiing’s unenforceable version of a PADI certification. The key points are how to find and rescue somebody and how to manage group dynamics to avoid bad decisions. Plus, some bits about what constitute bad decisions.

We were told one person skipped our call. A guy stayed off video and on mute the entire time, too. A group of three women, friends from business school at Berkeley Haas, were driving to take the training together at a house but ran late…