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.
Greg Cunningham, Avalanche Forecaster
greg@esavalanche.org
Greg grew up in New England. He earned a degree in Environmental Science while in school in Vermont, and quickly traded his hockey skates for skis. Upon graduating, he immersed himself in a lifelong apprenticeship with the Range of Light that has lasted nearly two decades and shows no signs of slowing down. Greg’s experience comes mostly from forecasting for ski areas and ski patrol operations, but he has also rounded out his professional life with more than a decade’s worth of guiding and forecasting work for both human-powered and mechanized operations. While he’s trained and skied all over the West and Alaska, he finds it harder and harder to leave the Sierra Nevada. He spends his free time roaming the mountains with his partner Jenna, and together they are thrilled to bring their passion and love for the Sierra to the East Side community.
Sean Smollen, Avalanche Forecaster
sean@esavalanche.org
Sean grew up in Carbondale, Colorado, and has been skiing his entire life. The chase for a lifetime of turns led him to complete the Colorado Mountain College Avalanche Science Program. He graduated in 2021, with two years of focused study in snowpack, terrain, and risk management. Sean has been a ski patroller, an intern with the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, and, more recently, has been dabbling in the endless winter. He has spent the last few years ski guiding year-round in Colorado, Alaska, and Chile. When Sean is not skiing, he spends his time biking, climbing, traveling, and working for the Colorado Outward Bound School in Leadville, CO. Sean’s passion for snow science is what drives his constant curiosity and desire for new ski adventures all over the world. Sean is fresh off a season in the Cordillera Central and is very excited for his first year with the Eastern Sierra Avalanche Center.
Barb Bemis, Administrative Manager
barb@esavalanche.org
Barb grew up in the Northeast and moved to California in 2014. 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
Gabe Taylor – Vice President
Allan Pietrasanta – Secretary
Christy McIntire – Treasurer
Forrest Cross
Scott Quirsfeld
Dave Sheek
Advisory Board
Michelle Mather
Ann Logan
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.