The mission of the Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center is to inform and educate the public on avalanche conditions in the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains of California.
The Friends of Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization overseen by a volunteer Board of Directors, outlined below. For general information, please email office@esavalanche.org. To reach out to the forecasting team, please email forecasters@esavalanche.org.
ESAC employs avalanche forecasters to provide daily avalanche advisories and field observations. An administrative manager supports the forecasters and the board of directors in fulfilling our mission and expanding opportunities for local community members.
Staff
Steve Mace, Director of Operations
steve@esavalanche.org
Steve grew up skiing in Golden, Colorado. He began to venture outside the gates in his mid teens and never looked back. While attending college in Durango, Colorado, he continued to push his skills and knowledge, earning his turns in the San Juan mountains. He has skied across the globe, from Japan to the Himalayas, where he helped start a ski school in Gulmarg, Kashmir. More recently Steve has worked as a ski guide in the Wallowa Mountains of eastern Oregon and as a member of the Snow Safety department at Mt Hood Meadows. When Steve isn’t skiing he spends his time guiding raft trips on the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.
Clancy Nelson, Lead Avalanche Forecaster
clancy@esavalanche.org
Clancy grew up in Mammoth with skis on his feet. His experience with snow safety started in 2007 as a professional ski patroller for Mammoth Mountain Ski Area. He spent 9 years as an observer for ESAC before starting his forecasting career in 2016. Clancy spent 4 years in Montana worrying about deep slabs and surface hoar for the Flathead Avalanche Center before happily returning home to the East Side and ESAC. His academic background is in environmental science. He has a Level 3 avalanche certification from AIARE, and he’s a professional member of the American Avalanche Association. He is an AIARE course instructor, and has training from the AMGA in the ski, alpine, and rock disciplines. Clancy prefers to get around on skis, but if it’s too warm and dry you can find him chasing his partner and dog around the mountains in running or climbing shoes.
Samantha Rubin, Avalanche Forecaster
sammy@esavalanche.org
Sammy grew up in SoCal, loving everything except snow sports! Thankfully, she found the best outdoor club of all time in college to lend her a snowboard and offer new friends to help her learn to ride. Fast forward a couple of years, and she was living in her Subaru and splitboarding the Sierra for months on end; she was working as a marine ecologist and conveniently had winters free to play. Eventually, Sammy made the leap and moved up to North Tahoe full-time to pursue professional experience and education in the snow sports and sciences industry. She’s since spent many years working as a ski patroller, an avalanche educator, a splitboard guide, and a forecaster throughout California. Sammy has splitboarded around the U.S and Canada, but her favorite range is, and will always be, the Sierra. When not marveling at snow sparkles for a living, you can find Sammy running, biking, cooking, or simply basking in the sun.
Brooke Maushund, Avalanche Forecaster
brooke@esavalanche.org
A longtime fan of type two fun and problem solving in beautiful settings, Brooke started out using her B.S. in Resource Science from UC Berkeley to work on off-grid renewable energy projects in Central America and Eastern Africa. Before enrolling in grad school, she moved to Yosemite “just for the summer” to climb in her early twenties…and she never made it back to school. Finding a better work v. climbing/skiing balance as a weather station technician for the Park Service while spending winters chasing snow, she soon set her sights on avalanche forecasting. Her path to get there included a brief stint patrolling, instructing avalanche courses, and guiding on the Eastside and in Washington. She served as a pro observer for multiple years for ESAC and interned at the Northwest Avalanche Center before starting her forecasting career in Idaho’s Sawtooth mountains. Her favorite type of day includes switching off the headlamps at sunrise, with many miles behind and ahead of you. She’s spent summers managing risk as a climbing ranger, search and rescue technician, and visiting avalanche forecaster in Alaska, Washington, Yosemite, and Patagonia.
Barb Bemis, Administrative Manager
barb@esavalanche.org
Barb grew up in the Northeast and moved to California 9 years ago. She has worked in various outdoor education, guiding, and instructional settings in the Eastern Sierra. These have ranged from teaching 5th graders to guiding adults in the Sierra to instructing adaptive sports in Mammoth Lakes. Barb lives in Bishop, CA and enjoys almost all of the activities one can find here – mountain biking, skiing, running, climbing, hiking, and beyond. When she needs a rest from those, you can find her gardening.
Board of Directors
Nate Greenberg – President
Forrest Cross – Vice President
Ann Piersall Logan – Secretary
Christy McIntire – Treasurer
Allan Pietrasanta
Gabe Taylor
Scott Quirsfeld
Dave Sheek
Walter Rosenthal – President in memoriam
Walter Rosenthal was the Snow and Avalanche Analyst for Mammoth Mountain, a remote sensing expert for the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory and a researcher at the Institute of Computational Earth System Science, University of California, Santa Barbara. He specialized in remote sensing of snow and snowpack processes related to sintering and avalanches. As a private consultant he provided operational subresolution snow mapping algorithms and programs to the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory from 1995 through 2002. Both the Army and the National Weather Service’s National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center employ his algorithms and are expanding their use to daily operational snow cover maps over North America.
Walter tragically lost his life while trying to save the lives of others in 2006. He was a vital force in the development of ESAC and is dearly missed.