The largest penalty California just handed Blackbird Mountain Guides rests on a proposition the guiding trade openly rejects: that an employer has a duty to pull its workers out of avalanche terrain when the danger runs high. State regulators call that failure "willful." Blackbird calls it the nature of the work.

Six months after a slide buried a guided ski party near Lake Tahoe and left nine dead, the state's workplace-safety agency has cited the Truckee outfit for seven violations and proposed $151,300 in fines — anchored by an $81,000 "willful" count that regulators say directly caused three guides' deaths. The dispute now heading to appeal is less about the money than about jurisdiction over risk itself: whether labor-safety rules built for jobsites can govern a wilderness where courting deadly terrain is the service being sold. A criminal referral and a second state probe are still live.

Start with what the agency could and couldn't touch. Cal/OSHA, the state body that polices workplaces, could reach only Blackbird's three employees who died on Feb. 17 — guides Andrew Alissandratos, Nicole Choo and Michael Henry — and not the six paying clients killed alongside them. All nine perished on a three-day hut tour near Perry's Peak in Nevada County, in a whiteout, in what has been called the deadliest avalanche in the state's modern record.

The citations, issued Aug. 12, were laid out in detail by CapRadio (external source, opens in a new tab), which reviewed the documentation. The headline $81,000 charge is classified "willful-serious accident related." Its substance: Blackbird lacked an effective injury-and-illness prevention program, and specifically failed to build procedures to remove guides from terrain "in, near or below" a slide path as the hazard rose, or to keep them from acting against the forecast. A second avalanche-specific citation, $16,200 and "serious accident-related," faults the company for having no plan to react when the Sierra Avalanche Center bumped its rating to "high" that morning — a level whose own guidance is to stay out of avalanche terrain — and for never weighing the danger of merging two tour groups into one 15-person party for the exit.

Three additional "serious" counts, $16,200 each, cover training gaps and protective gear the agency says should at least have been considered, among them avalanche airbags and Avalungs. Two smaller general violations round out the seven.

The headline $81,000 charge is classified "willful-serious accident related."

Blackbird is contesting every one. In its appeal, the company said the citations misrepresent both the profession and the safety program it built, and drew a hard line between the backcountry and a jobsite: guiding, it argued, unfolds in wilderness where conditions shift by the minute, not in a controlled setting like a construction site. Founder Zeb Blais, who holds the industry's top international certification, said his guides worked with care and professionalism. Those statements were reported by CapRadio and CBS Sacramento (external source, opens in a new tab).

Here is where the case gets unusual. Blackbird had already commissioned its own outside review, released Aug. 9, and that report defended the disputed practice outright — describing work under elevated avalanche hazard as accepted in the profession when risk is properly managed. Per CapRadio, it also conceded the guides knew the danger was high and never explained why the party left its huts before the risk eased. So the company's own expert blessed the exact conduct the regulator labels a willful hazard. That gap is the appeal in miniature.

None of this is settled. A state Department of Industrial Relations spokesperson said Cal/OSHA's Bureau of Investigations still has an open inquiry, and the Nevada County Sheriff's Office has handed its findings to the district attorney to weigh possible criminal charges, CBS reported. An appeal before the state's safety board can grind on for years, and the $151,300 is a proposed figure, not a paid one. The victims, CBS reported, were drawn mostly from the Bay Area, with others from the Truckee area and Idaho — which is why the outcome matters to the weekend skiers who fill Tahoe every season.

The question underneath the paperwork isn't whether Blackbird writes a check. It's whether California can enforce a "correct the hazard" standard in a place where the hazard is the whole point of going.