After an enormous storm dumped 3 feet of snow on Mammoth Mountain, rookie ski patroller Claire Murphy and a partner scrambled to help make the resort safe for guests ahead of a very busy — and very lucrative — Presidents Day weekend.
In howling wind and blowing snow, the patrollers labored to clear enormous piles of fresh, unstable powder from a steep, experts-only run, one of a group appropriately named the “Avalanche Chutes.”
Ski patrollers use hand-held explosives, and their own skis, to deliberately trigger small slides in the chutes before the resort opens, to prevent an avalanche from crashing down later in the day on thousands of paying customers gliding happily — and obliviously — along the much gentler slopes below.
Mammoth Mountain ski patrol members Claire Murphy, left, and Cole Murphy (no relation) both died while doing avalanche mitigation on the mountain.
(Courtesy of Lisa Apa; Tracy Murphy)
But something went horribly wrong that day. Instead of remaining safely above the sliding snow, Murphy and her partner got caught in it. He was buried up to his neck but survived. She was trapped beneath the collapsing wall of white and got crushed to death against a towering fir tree. She was 25 years old.
The avalanche that killed the young patroller on Feb. 14, 2025, stunned Mammoth’s tight-knit ski community. Her friends and colleagues were consumed with grief, but most regarded it as a freak accident, something that hadn’t happened before and was unlikely to be repeated.
But then, less than a year later, it happened again.
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In late December — after a “Christmas miracle” storm dumped more than 5 feet of snow on the previously parched resort — 30-year-old ski patroller Cole Murphy (no relation to Claire) and his partner were hurrying to clear the same chutes before the busiest week of the year.
They, too, were caught in a deliberately triggered slide. Cole’s partner suffered a serious leg injury, but he survived.
Signs on top of Lincoln Mountain at Mammoth advise skiers that the runs are for experts only.
Cole was swept away and carried hundreds of feet down the mountain, where he suffocated beneath more than a meter of avalanche debris, according to two sources. Both were involved in the effort to save Cole, but asked not to be identified because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
With the sudden deaths of two young patrollers in such a short span, and in such distressingly similar circumstances — Claire and Cole came to rest within a few hundred yards of each other — questions began to swirl.
Were the resort’s managers pushing too hard to open the mountain after major storms? Had training standards slipped, pushing relatively inexperienced ski patrollers into dangerous situations? Are young ski patrollers afraid to speak up, even when they think they’ve been asked to take unreasonable risks?
Lisa Apa, Claire Murphy’s mother, said she begged mountain officials to take a hard look at their training and safety procedures after her daughter’s death — to figure out what went wrong and make sure it never happened again.
They blew her off, she said.
A small memorial remains at a tree, where an avalanche claimed the life of ski patrol member Claire Murphy.
When she heard about the second death, Apa said she immediately fired off a text to a senior ski patrol manager at Mammoth: “You killed another ski patroller … you’ve learned nothing!”
She told a Times reporter last week, “Claire would be f—ing furious if she knew this happened a second time.”
Mammoth Mountain officials have remained measured in their public response.
In a statement emailed to The Times, Mammoth Mountain President and Chief Operating Officer Eric Clark wrote that, after Claire Murphy’s death, the ski patrol had been empowered to “pursue a slower, phased opening of the mountain on storm days.”
After Cole Murphy’s death 10 months later, Clark wrote that resort managers “immediately instituted” measures to “de-pressurize storm mornings,” giving ski patrol more time to work and more latitude to keep chair lifts closed until the mountain is deemed safe.
In a follow-up interview, Clark insisted the pressure on Mammoth’s managers to open quickly after big storms comes from customers desperate to ski fresh powder, not from corporate executives chasing profits.
Chair 22 takes skiers to the top of Lincoln Mountain at Mammoth, where two ski patrollers have been killed by avalanches in the last year.
“Maybe 10 years ago that was different,” Clark said. But after the most recent accident, the message from the resort’s owners — Alterra Mountain Co., a privately held, multibillion-dollar conglomerate that owns 19 resorts across the U.S. and Canada — was to use caution.
“Make sure you’re taking your time,” Clark said they told him.
Apa, who sobbed talking about her daughter, gasped when she heard that.
Of course senior executives offer reassuring words after a tragedy, she said. But as a former business journalist, who once anchored a show called “Street Smart” on Bloomberg TV, Apa said she spent her career around top corporate officers. Anyone who believes profit motive doesn’t drive such decisions is naive, she said.
“Maybe you’re not getting a phone call, or an email, from the CEO saying, ‘get this mountain open today!’” she said. But any manager who develops a reputation as someone who’s afraid to open after a storm, on the busiest day of the year, “won’t be around very long,” she said.
No doubt, many skiers are desperate to hit the slopes after a storm brings fresh powder.
The sensation of floating down the hill with almost no resistance is dreamlike and addictive. No other conditions compare.
That’s why social media is full of influencers bragging about their epic “pow days,” and why hordes of paying customers start champing at the bit when the mountain is covered in a fresh blanket of white, but the ski patrol won’t let them at it.
A former Mammoth ski patroller recalled years of riding lifts with eager customers complaining that the steepest runs with the deepest powder were still closed for avalanche control.
Mammoth Mountain‘s summit is more than 11,000 feet high and averages nearly 400 inches of annual snowfall.
“I’d point to all of the mountains around Mammoth,” he said. There are dozens of beautiful, towering summits in the surrounding eastern Sierra with absolutely no rules and nobody to stop an adventurous soul from climbing up and skiing down.
But there are no chairlifts, so getting up those mountains is a physically exhausting test of will. And there’s no avalanche control, so you’re on your own when it comes to determining which slopes are safe, which are death traps.
“If you’re such an expert, why aren’t you over there,” the ski patroller said he’d ask, usually ending the conversation.
Within the boundaries of commercial ski resorts, avalanche control takes many forms.
At Mammoth, the steepest slopes near the 11,000-foot-high summit are controlled with a howitzer — an actual cannon. When the resort is closed, crews fire explosive shells across a valley up into the highest, heaviest and most threatening piles of fresh snow. Their aim has to be excellent, since stray shrapnel can do serious damage to ski lifts. But it’s a remarkably efficient way to get enormous quantities of snow sliding down the mountain without putting anyone at risk.
The ski patrol office at the top of Lincoln Mountain.
Another option is called a “Boom Whoosh,” which looks like an industrial chimney and is installed just above spots where dangerous piles of snow frequently accumulate. It works by remote control, igniting a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen — like lighting a gigantic camping stove — to create a shock wave that triggers an avalanche. Mammoth has one at the moment, near the summit above a run called Climax, and officials are hoping to install more.
Then there’s the old-fashioned technique: sending ski patrollers into the steepest, most technical terrain with backpacks full of explosives.
That’s what happens in the Avalanche Chutes — known locally as “the avis” — a handful of natural rock and snow slide paths carved by thousands of years of erosion into the side of a 10,000-foot sub-peak called Lincoln Mountain. Patrollers start early in the morning after a storm and ride a snowcat — like a school bus on tank treads — to a plateau just above the chutes.
Big red signs with black diamonds are everywhere on Lincoln Mountain, indicating its trails are for experts only. The chutes are the steepest trails of all, marked on maps with two black diamonds, the highest rating possible. Casual skiers go weak in the knees at the thought of making a wrong turn onto a vertigo-inducing “double-black.”
After hopping out of the snowcat, patrollers divide into pairs and work their way toward the chutes. Sometimes the wind is so strong it scours nearby boulders free of snow, so they have to take off their skis and climb over the bare rocks in their awkward, plastic boots to get to the edge.
Once in place, one of the patrollers tosses a hand-held explosive — it looks like a cartoon stick of dynamite — down the hill. The patrollers cover their ears, wait for the boom, and hope the explosion has loosened the big stuff and sent it sliding.
Then they ski down in carefully choreographed zigzags, sometimes hopping up as they go, to dislodge any remaining loose slabs beneath their feet.
A view of the Avalanche Chutes at Mammoth, where two ski patrollers have died in the last year.
The key to “ski cutting,” as it’s called, is to make sure your partner is anchored in a secure spot, usually off to the edge of the chute and out of the way of a potential slide, before you start moving.
In normal conditions, it’s just another day at the office. But after a massive “atmospheric river” storm, the risks increase.
This season’s Christmas storm was a monster, and it arrived with the biggest crowds of the year.
To keep the customers happy, Mammoth executives opened the lower part of the mountain on Christmas Day, the portion least exposed to avalanche risk. But there was so much fresh snow, patrollers spent the day digging out people who had simply gotten stuck in huge drifts, even on the relatively flat terrain.
And then, in the early afternoon, Raymond Albert, a 71-year-old regular known to fellow skiers as “every day Ray,” was spotted in a pocket of deep, fresh snow beside a well-traveled run near the bottom of Lincoln Mountain.
He had somehow popped out of his skis, which were behind him, and pitched forward, ending up with his head in the snow and his feet in the air, according to a written report of the incident provided to his family.
Looking down one of the Avalanche Chutes at Mammoth Mountain.
It’s unclear how long he was in that position before bystanders dug him out. When ski patrollers arrived he had no pulse. With so much fresh snow on the ground, the patrollers struggled to find a firm enough surface to lay him on his back and perform CPR. They finally used a bystander’s legs as a makeshift platform, according to the report, but could not revive him.
In a normal week, Albert’s death would have been big news, but it received almost no public attention because early the next morning, Cole Murphy and his colleagues headed up Lincoln Mountain to clear the chutes.
It’s still not publicly known what caused the slide that buried Murphy and his partner, but according to two people involved in the effort to save Murphy’s life, witnesses said that an avalanche triggered by an explosive in a neighboring chute might have “propagated” horizontally to where Murphy and his partner were working — taking them by surprise.
Resort officials declined to answer detailed questions about either Claire or Cole Murphy’s deaths, saying their lawyers advised them not to offer specifics during ongoing investigations by the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health.
As soon as Cole Murphy disappeared in that wall of white, the clock started ticking. More than 90% of avalanche victims survive if they can be freed within 15 minutes, according to the Utah Avalanche Center, but the odds drop “catastrophically” after that.
It took Cole’s desperate colleagues 18 minutes to locate him and dig him out, sources said. When they finally pulled him free, his skin was blue and he wasn’t breathing, the sources said.
He was airlifted to a hospital in Reno and pronounced dead days later.
Tracy Murphy, Cole’s mother, said her son loved Mammoth Lakes and the tight bonds he forged on that “little island” of outdoor enthusiasts, surrounded on all sides by hundreds of miles of mountains and desert.
After Claire’s accident, Tracy Murphy said her son was “shaken to the core.”
Cole’s roommate was the patroller in the chute with Claire that day, she said. Last month, the roommate was among the patrollers frantically trying to dig Cole free.
She’s waiting for OSHA’s report, but for now, Murphy said, “I believe that Mammoth would not have knowingly put any patroller in danger. I feel, in my heart, that this was just an extremely unlucky event.”
Her son had been on the job for a few years before his accident; Claire Murphy had been a ski patroller for only a couple of months before hers.
The wind was howling “like a jet engine” that day, according to accounts Apa received from ski patrollers who were there.
The witnesses told Apa that Claire’s partner triggered the fatal avalanche with his skis, and was quickly swallowed by it. But he survived, at least in part because he was about 6½ feet tall and his head remained above the debris.
It’s still a mystery why Claire was in the path of the slide, but the difficulty of hearing and seeing each other amid the wind and blowing snow probably played a part, Apa said.
Seconds after the slide began, it slammed Claire into the tree. When her colleagues dug her out, she was upright, with her back pinned against the trunk. She was facing uphill, Apa said, looking straight at the wall of snow bearing down on her.
Claire probably had no time to react, Apa said, pausing to steady herself before finishing the thought, but she hoped her daughter didn’t suffer. “It kills me to think of her trapped there, scared,” she said.
After hearing about the accident, Apa raced to Mammoth from the East Coast on a private jet provided by the mountain. She implored doctors to keep Claire’s heart beating until she arrived, she said. “I can’t come to a dead body, you have to keep her alive so I can hold her hand,” she begged.
Lisa Apa, left, with her daughter Claire Murphy.
(Lisa Apa)
Apa arrived in time to spend a few days in a Reno hospital with her unconscious daughter. She washed and braided her hair, read her letters from people wishing her well, and thought about what she wanted to say to the other young women on the ski patrol.
“Don’t get out of the snowcat if you’re scared,” she said she told them at Claire’s memorial service and in private conversations. “Go back down the mountain if you think what they’re doing is wrong. You have to say something, you have to.”
But that’s tough, Apa acknowledged, because there are only so many ski patrol jobs in the country, and most of those women had been dreaming about it since they were little girls.
Becoming persona non grata at either of the two big companies that dominate the U.S. ski industry — Alterra and Vail Resorts — could be a career killer, patrollers fear.
Apa said she is still haunted by the possibility that concern for their jobs prevents patrollers from pushing for safer working conditions, and that what happened to Claire and Cole will soon be forgotten.
On a cold, crisp day last week, beneath an almost impossibly peaceful cobalt sky, a reporter skied the Avalanche Chutes with a group of locals including a former patroller and a professional mountain guide who trains clients on avalanche safety.
There had been no significant fresh snow for weeks, so no one was worried about avalanches. Alone on the broad, steep face, the only sound came from the metal edges of skis biting into the hard surface.
The group pointed their skis toward a stand of tall fir trees hundreds of feet below. Some of them had been snapped in half by previous avalanches, one was still caked on its uphill side with thousands of pounds of snow.
And one, just below it, had a recent boot track around its base. A photographer trained his sharp eye on a faded strand of red cloth, light as gossamer, pinned to the trunk at eye level. Dried rose petals hung around it.
Claire’s tree. She hasn’t been forgotten.