The women the mountain took: Mothers, mentors remembered after Castle Peak avalanche

Movie nights on a garage door.

A porch adjusted with umbrellas to keep neighborhood children shaded.

A last-minute Zoom workshop that never began.

Across the Bay Area and Tahoe region, the women killed in Tuesday’s avalanche are being remembered in the small, ordinary details that defined their lives.

Caroline Sekar, 45, lived on a tight-knit block in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights where children drift between houses and parents trade dinners and carpools. Neighbors described her as the “brightest, sunniest and most positive person — an amazing mom.”

“The way it works with all these kids around the same ages is like, if you’re mom to one, you’re mom to all,” said Jen Wofford, who lives across the street. “And she definitely was that, and then some.”

Related: Avalanche near Castle Peak: What we know so far about the deadliest slide in California history

During the pandemic, Sekar helped close the block to traffic and projected movie nights onto her garage door. She created a WhatsApp group so parents could keep track of where their children were playing and opened her porch for produce drop-offs.

“She called it ‘babysitting them,’” Wofford said. “If it’s hot, there’s an umbrella. If it’s raining, there’s an umbrella at a different angle.”

Skiing was central to the Sekars’ lives. They spent summers in Tahoe and had gone to the mountains for ski week when the avalanche struck near Castle Peak as a group of 15 skiers returned from a three-day guided trip to the Frog Lake huts.

Nine people were killed. Six survived. Search crews located eight of the victims Tuesday night but were forced to leave their bodies on the slope as severe weather moved in. Recovery teams are waiting for conditions to improve.

“That part really bothers me,” Wofford said quietly. “It’s just horrible.”

Carrie Atkin had also built her life around the mountains — deliberately.

A former Harvard track and field athlete with degrees in applied mathematics and economics, Atkin worked as a business coach before moving with her husband and two children from San Francisco to Soda Springs near Donner Summit during the pandemic.

“Everyone she touched in her life benefited,” said Amy Lauer, an executive coach who partnered with her professionally. “She was a very special human being. She made the planet a better place.”

Atkin’s son attended Sugar Bowl Academy for young skiers. For several years, she and her husband, Peter, took their children to Costa Rica for months each fall so they could attend school there — a choice friends described as emblematic of how intentionally she lived.

“Carrie really lived the life she wanted to lead,” Lauer said. “She was very authentic to who she was.”

The two women were scheduled to conduct a workshop together Wednesday. When Atkin did not log on, Lauer feared something was wrong but hoped she had been injured or was assisting with rescue efforts. Peter, a business executive, is also a trained search-and-rescue technician.

Instead, he called with the news.

“I don’t know if I’ll have another partner again,” Lauer said. “I will miss her terribly. I do already.”

In Marin County, Danielle Keatley moved easily between biotech boardrooms and dinner tables.

At home in Larkspur, she balanced a demanding career — leading investor relations and corporate communications at South San Francisco-based Structure Therapeutics — with a winery she built alongside her husband, Dave.

“Danielle loves making and sharing delicious food with friends and thinks that it needs a good wine to go along with it,” the Keatley Wines website says.

Larkspur Mayor Stephanie Andre described her as a “radiant, beautiful soul.”

“She was warm, kind and exuded a special quality that drew people to her,” Andre said.

Friends say she often donated wine to local events and gathered people around food, conversation and snowy weekends in Tahoe with their children.

The avalanche has shaken one of Northern California’s tightest ski communities.

Several of the women were part of the Sugar Bowl Academy network, where winter weekends revolve around carpools and race schedules.

“This is a devastating loss for our community,” executive director Stephen McMahon said Friday. “Our focus is on caring for the families and respecting their request for privacy and space as they grieve their sudden and profound loss.”

The grief is not confined to the families who lost someone. It is spreading through a backcountry community where everyone skis together — and everyone knows what almost happened.

In Truckee, backcountry educator Sarah Reynaud said she had planned to ski-tour to Frog Lake the same week.

“We would’ve been with that group,” she said.

One of her teenage daughters became ill, and the family canceled the trip. Reynaud and her husband own Tahoe Mountain School; her husband, Steve Reynaud, is a forecaster with the Sierra Avalanche Center.

Now she is watching grief ripple through a community where guides, forecasters and families have known each other for decades.

“It’s a really tight community, and it’s really devastating,” she said. “It’s just a horrific situation.”

Reynaud said Blackbird Mountain Guides — the Truckee company that led the trip and lost three guides in the slide — is widely regarded as experienced. The Frog Lake huts, which opened to the public only five years ago after nearly a century of private ownership, have become a popular destination.

The Truckee Donner Land Trust notes that all recommended routes in and out carry some degree of avalanche risk.

“On a high avalanche day, maybe there isn’t a safe way to go in and out of there,” Reynaud said.

Her neighbors, like many across the region, are struggling to understand what happened.

“My neighbor was just asking, ‘Why were they out there?’” Reynaud said. “I can’t answer that.”

Those questions — about weather, timing and route decisions — now hang over a slope where avalanche poles mark the places the victims’ bodies remain beneath the snow.

Six of the nine people killed have been publicly identified by family members and associates: Sekar, Atkin, Keatley, Liz Clabaugh, Kate Morse and Kate Vitt. Additional identities have not yet been released as families continue to be notified.

“They were passionate, skilled skiers who cherished time together in the mountains,” the families said in a statement.

Across neighborhoods in San Francisco, Larkspur, the Tahoe basin and beyond, the loss is settling in — at dinner tables, in school drop-offs and along a mountainside waiting for the weather to shift.