A Second Death on Lincoln Mountain: How Regulators Found Mammoth Mountain "Willfully" at Fault

Just after 7:30 a.m. on December 26, 2025, before the lifts had opened for the day, two Mammoth Mountain ski patrollers were working the slopes of Lincoln Mountain, deliberately triggering small slides to make the terrain safe for the public. It was routine, hazardous work — the kind ski patrol does every storm cycle at resorts across the Sierra Nevada. That morning, the mountain had already dropped more than five feet of snow in three days.

The slope gave way beneath them instead.

Both patrollers were buried. One escaped with non-life-threatening injuries. The other, 30-year-old Cole Murphy of Tacoma, Washington, was buried for roughly 15 minutes before rescuers reached him. He was flown out for emergency care and died of his injuries two days later, on December 28.

It was the second time in less than a year that a Mammoth ski patroller had been killed doing exactly this kind of work, in exactly this part of the mountain. Ten months earlier, on Valentine's Day 2025, 25-year-old patroller Claire Murphy — no relation to Cole — died after being caught in a slide while clearing the resort's "Avalanche Chutes," an area that sits just above a beginner-terrain chairlift.

Now, a state inspection record confirms what that grim symmetry suggested: regulators believe the resort's safety failures were not incidental.

What the citation says

According to an inspection filed with California's Division of Occupational Safety and Health — Cal/OSHA, whose data feeds into the federal OSHA inspection database — the agency opened its investigation into Cole Murphy's death on December 30, 2025, four days after the avalanche. The case, formally an "accident" investigation tied to activity number 2383882, closed out on June 24, 2026, when Cal/OSHA issued Mammoth Mountain Ski Area LLC three citations totaling $126,000 in penalties.

The breakdown, per the inspection record:

One "willful" violation, $90,000 — cited under California Code of Regulations Title 8, Section 3380(c), the state's general personal protective equipment standard. Reporting on the citation indicates it centers on avalanche airbags, inflatable backpacks designed to keep a buried skier closer to the snow's surface. Investigators reportedly concluded the resort had not properly trained patrollers on deploying them.

One "serious" violation, $18,000 — cited under Section 5351(g), part of the state's regulations governing employee protection during hazardous operations.

One "serious" violation, $18,000 — cited under Section 5357(b)(4)(b), which falls under Cal/OSHA's standards for controlling workplace hazards during high-risk tasks; reporting has tied this citation to breakdowns in communication and visual contact between the two patrollers during the mitigation work.

Under California's regulatory framework, a "willful" classification is reserved for cases where an employer is found to have acted with intentional disregard for, or plain indifference to, worker safety — a markedly harsher finding than a routine "serious" violation. All three citations are listed as contested, with a contest date of July 22, 2026, and the case remains formally open.

Mammoth Mountain has said it has since corrected the cited conditions and is appealing the citations.

An eerily similar case, seven months earlier

The June 2026 citations were not Cal/OSHA's first finding against the resort over patroller deaths on Lincoln Mountain. In July 2025, the agency issued a separate set of citations — three violations totaling $26,810 — tied to Claire Murphy's death that February. Investigators in that case concluded the resort had put staff in unnecessary danger without adequate safeguards, had failed to establish workable "safe zones" for patrollers to shelter in during mitigation work, and lacked proper documentation of avalanche training. A related "serious" citation centered on the same equipment now at issue in Cole Murphy's case: investigators found that Murphy and her partner had not deployed their avalanche airbags at the time of the slide.

Mammoth disputed those findings too. In a statement to the outdoor-sports outlet POWDER, a resort spokesperson said media coverage had mischaracterized Cal/OSHA's determination as a definitive finding of fault, calling it instead an administrative determination about regulatory interpretation that carries no legal finding of fact. The company said it respectfully disagreed with the division's interpretation and application of the relevant standards and was exercising its right to appeal.

The human toll

For the families involved, the regulatory back-and-forth is set against unresolved grief. Cole Murphy's mother, Tracy Murphy — who by profession works in insurance and says she has grown familiar with how Cal/OSHA investigations unfold — has said publicly that she does not believe the resort intentionally endangered her son or any patroller that day. She has described the ski patrol team as people who had devoted decades to the mountain and would not have knowingly put colleagues at risk, even as she acknowledged that not everything about the resort's processes was perfect.

Murphy grew up in northeast Tacoma, played soccer and junior golf, and worked his way through ski resorts in Oregon, Wyoming and Montana before landing at Mammoth, where he worked both winter and summer seasons. In a statement released through the resort, his family said the mountain was where he felt most alive, and that ski patrol was not just a job for him but a calling.

A pattern regulators are watching

Avalanche mitigation — using hand charges, remote-triggered systems or ski cuts to intentionally release unstable snow before the public arrives — is inherently dangerous work, and fatalities among professional patrollers, while rare, are not unheard of nationally. What has drawn sustained regulatory and media attention to Mammoth specifically is the repetition: two deaths, on the same peak, performing the same category of task, within a single calendar year — followed by two separate state findings that safety protocols around that work fell short, one of them rising to the willful standard reserved for employers found to have shown intentional disregard for worker safety.

Both citations remain under appeal, meaning Cal/OSHA's findings have not been finally adjudicated. The outcome will determine not only what Mammoth Mountain ultimately pays, but what — if anything — a state regulator has formally established about why two young patrollers died doing the same job on the same mountain less than a year apart.