Unsorted Thoughts on Castle Peak
Yes, I sometimes ski in storms. I have a particular set of criteria for considering it, and a particular set of places where I'll do it, in a particular set of ways, but as a matter of policy it's not off the table for me.
What is off the table is: I never combine storm skiing with avalanche terrain. That's not just a hard limit; it's an easy one. You can easily structure things so your avalanche risk is zero, which frees up bandwidth to worry about all the other storm-skiing hazards...
Exposure. Getting lost. All the things that can happen in a high-variance, high-energy context that you've never seen before. And of course mundane hazards: trees snapping. Ice chunks falling. Or maybe you just get clocked out on the roads, which are probably their own disaster.
So, at bedrock, and even with avalanches objectively removed from the equation, it's not a trivial choice.
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My avalanche philosophy, cut to its essence, might be something like: when you see giant rocks floating in the sky, avoid walking beneath them rather than trying to figure out which ones are going to fall.
That's an over-simplification, obviously. But maybe a useful one. Not all of life has to be rocket science.
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I'm not familiar with the Castle Peak area or the Frog Lake Hut, so I looked it up in Google Earth. I've rotated the image so the slopes of maximum hazard (NE aspects) are pointing toward you. The view is enough to make a few guesses at what the primary challenge was.
There are obvious safe paths from the hut to the freeway, but they're either circuitous or narrow.
In a true monster of a Sierra storm, you'd probably want to minimize your travel distance. You'd probably also want to stay bunched up, so no one got lost. And unless you were being very sharp with a compass or a GPS, it would be easy to wander into trouble.
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I admit I feel angry here. Choosing to enter avalanche-capable terrain under those conditions is utterly incomprehensible to me.
And horrifying.
— February 18, 2026
Andy Lewicky is the author and creator of SierraDescents