Capsized: Lives upended and lives saved during ‘freak’ storm on Lake Tahoe
Ken and Emilie Corcoran, a retired couple who summer at Lake Tahoe, remember the young family from across the street taking a walk toward the water.
Josh Pickles, 37, and Jordan Sugar-Carlsgaard, San Francisco residents who bought their Tahoe house four years ago, had their two dogs, Harper and Petey, on leashes and their 7-month-old daughter in a stroller. They told the Corcorans they planned to host visitors that weekend, to celebrate the 71st birthday of Pickles’ mother, and put them up in nearby homes through Airbnb — where Sugar-Carlsgaard works as the CEO’s executive assistant.
“They were incredible neighbors,” Emilie Corcoran, 75, said in an interview. “I mean, the best neighbors you could ever want to have.” The two couples, though separated by at least a generation and decades of experience at Tahoe, would look after each other’s homes, exchange gifts such as a home-baked sourdough from Pickles and stop to talk on their woodsy street.
A few days after that particular walk, Pickles, his parents and most of the other guests were dead. The Corcorans worry that Sugar-Carlsgaard, her baby now fatherless, might not return.
The ferocious storm that flipped Pickles’ Chris-Craft boat near D.L. Bliss State Park on June 21 has been described by locals as the most abrupt and severe one they had seen on the 191-square-mile alpine lake. First responders, Tahoe residents, experienced captains and experts on weather and safety painted a picture of both extreme misfortune and lucky coincidences that day. People caught in the tempest discovered the limits of human control.
Some also left amazed that the deadliest day on Tahoe in recent memory was not even deadlier — and took it as a reminder of boating precautions, as visitors descend for Fourth of July weekend at the Sierra vacation destination.
“I don’t like using the term freak storm, but that was a freak storm,” said Jim Drennan, chief of South Lake Tahoe Fire Rescue, reflecting on it in his office last week. “I’ve never seen anything like that come in and be done in two hours.”
Much to celebrate in Emerald Bay
A wind advisory for June 20 had warned about sustained winds as fast as 25 mph, with gusts of up to 40, from the southwest, where Tahoe’s prevailing winds usually originate. The National Weather Service’s Reno, Nevada, office did not issue a wind advisory covering the lake for the following day, the second official day of summer, which started off sunny and cool.
Steve Buttling, a captain from New Zealand who arrived at Tahoe in 1980 and goes by “Kiwi” around Tahoe Keys Marina, saw a 20% chance of afternoon thunderstorms forecast. That usually only meant some rain and wind, he said. At noon, he set out in a charter boat called the Blue Warrior with a crew member and about 15 women on board for a bachelorette party.
They anchored the boat in Emerald Bay, a cove in the southwest corner of the lake, about 1 p.m. Roughly 20 minutes later, Buttling said, the Chris-Craft whose bottom he would later see pictured in the news entered the bay and came into view.
“It’s a brand-new Chris-Craft. When you see a boat like that, it kind of catches your eye,” said Eric Hansen, the Blue Warrior’s crew member.
Buttling said he watched people on the Chris-Craft try to anchor the boat and then abandon the effort when the anchor seemingly failed to catch on the lake bed. At one point, Hansen said, people aboard the two boats traded the customary waves.
“They were just chilling adrift,” Hansen said, referring to the Chris-Craft’s passengers. “It looked like they were all, you know, just enjoying the weather we had. It was beautiful at first.”
But as Buttling and Hansen pulled the Blue Warrior’s anchor up at about 2 p.m., rain began to sprinkle, Hansen said.
Outside the bay, captain Zach Gordon saw dark clouds approaching from the north and told the group of six on his charter boat to pull their fishing lines from the water. Before long, waves were crashing every second and a half, Gordon said. He made a beeline for refuge in Emerald Bay, where he said he believes he saw the same Chris-Craft.
About a half-mile east of the bay at approximately 2:15 p.m., captain Stephen Henderson saw the storm worsening on the open lake from the helm of the Tahoe Star, a 54-foot custom yacht chartered by a family that day. The gales blew from the north, causing waves to build over the run of the lake.
“A wall of white was coming at us, and there was barely any blue, and it came fast,” Henderson said.
Buttling and Henderson each navigated safely back to the marina; Buttling recorded a video clip on his phone at 2:37 p.m. during the treacherous ride. Gordon waited out the storm, protected in the bay. It is unclear when or why Pickles’ Chris-Craft left.
Capsizing with 10 people
Still farther east, Danielle Johnston was out for a day on the lake to celebrate her son Connor’s recent graduation from Cal Poly with her husband, Connor and seven of his friends. As the boat began to rock, one of the recent graduates played the “Pirates of the Caribbean” theme song. Johnston knew better.
“I said to turn that off,” she said. Water splashed into the boat. At 2:20 p.m., she called 911.
She was not the only one. The dispatch center at the South Lake Tahoe Police Department alone received more than 50 emergency calls about the storm, said Lt. Scott Crivelli, a department spokesperson.
Her call dropped, and Johnston relayed by text that their boat was sinking. The Police Department’s rescue boat sliced across the choppy water toward the Johnstons’ MasterCraft. Unable to transfer the 10 passengers to the rescue boat, the police officers began to tug the MasterCraft toward Keys Marina.
South Lake Tahoe Fire Rescue sent a crew to power the department’s red-accented rescue vessel into action. Capt. Trent Renner, a 13-year veteran of the department, supervised an engineer and Stuart Bogle, a newer firefighter and paramedic who had mastered swimming over years of playing water polo.
“Initially, we were assigned to Rubicon Bay,” where another emergency was reportedly unfolding on the water near D.L. Bliss State Park, Renner recalled during a joint interview alongside Bogle at the department’s Station No. 3. They got reassigned to help the police boat not far from the marina first.
The firefighters followed behind the Johnstons’ boat, serving as lifeguards. The MasterCraft capsized, throwing the group into the water. Bogle dove in, helping people reach the two rescue boats and swimming one person to shore. Johnston remembers being weighed down by her waterlogged jeans and down jacket as she swam herself.
Everyone aboard wore life jackets as they were being towed to safety, Johnston said.
As ambulances took all 10 to the hospital, where none needed medical care, the trio of firefighters regrouped at the marina. They received instructions to turn toward D.L. Bliss, where rescuers now needed to be rescued.
At home in Tahoma
Pickles and Sugar-Carlsgaard bought their stone-and-wood mountain house in Tahoma, a residential area near Highway 89 between South Lake Tahoe and Tahoe City, in 2021. They married two years later.
The Bay Area couple would sometimes work remotely there, Ken Corcoran, 76, said. Pickles, working at DoorDash as the global head of strategic sourcing and procurement, would join calls while strolling around the grid of streets lined by pine, fir and cedar trees.
Tahoma began as a resort in 1916, its name merging the words Tahoe and home, and is now home to a mix of longtime locals and wealthier newcomers.
Pickles and Sugar-Carlsgaard struck the Corcorans as conscientious and outdoorsy, honeymooning on an African safari and savoring their respites from city life. Pickles bought the 27-foot-long Chris-Craft bowrider last summer. Ken Corcoran recalled seeing the new beige boat in August in the driveway across the street.
“He was real interested in a solid, family boat,” Ken Corcoran said, adding that he had heard Pickles talk about experiences sailing in the San Francisco Bay with his father.
June 21 marked Pickles’ third excursion on the boat, and his first this year, according to Sam Singer, a spokesperson for Sugar-Carlsgaard. Six of the people on board were not relatives, but close friends of Pickles’ mother, Paula Bozinovich, whose birthday some had traveled from as far away as upstate New York to celebrate, Singer said.
When asked a series of questions to clarify the day’s events, including when and where the Chris-Craft set off, Singer said he left a message with the family and did not hear a response.
Sugar-Carlsgaard stayed home with her baby daughter, Singer said. People in Tahoma could tell that the weather was deteriorating. A video captured by one resident shows snow falling in the neighborhood at 3:39 p.m.
On the water, precipitation was the least of people’s problems.
An unseasonable cold front caused sustained northerly winds of over 20 mph, accompanied by 45 mph gusts, meteorologists have said. The wind whipped up waves estimated to be 8 feet tall, taller by some boaters’ accounts. Clouds filled the sky and shrouded the basin in fog. Temperatures plummeted — from 53.6 to 42.8 degrees between 2 p.m. and 3 p.m., as measured at the airport less than three miles from the lake.
Finding the Chris-Craft
Much of the shoreline along D.L. Bliss State Park, which is named after a 19th-century timber tycoon, consists of a towering rock face dotted with shrubs and trees. A trail overlooking the steep drop gives hikers a view from Rubicon Point, the largest protrusion of the land directly north of Emerald Bay’s mouth.
The descent to the deepest water is similarly steep there, forming an underwater cliff that can act like a surf break. When waves run into a gentle shore, their energy dissipates, said Alex Forrest, a professor at UC Davis’ Tahoe Environmental Research Center. When they approach a wall, they get amplified, he said.
Not long before 3 p.m., California State Parks received a report about “a boat that was up against the rocks” near D.L. Bliss, according to Dan Youngren, the chief ranger for the Sierra District. Working elsewhere that day, Youngren said he received a call at 2:53 p.m. from a colleague alerting him that parks personnel were on the way there.
The park is closed to cars due to a multi-year renovation of its water system. A State Parks ranger, who happened to be accompanied by the agency’s sole summer lifeguard at Tahoe, unlocked a gate to drive down to the lake, Youngren said in a phone interview.
Looking out on the water, they saw the Chris-Craft overturned about 30 yards offshore and several people around it in the water, face down.
The lifeguard, already wearing a wetsuit, jumped in and swam back to shore holding a person who appeared to be dead, according to Youngren. The lifeguard then reportedly caught sight of a woman who was alive and asking for help.
The lifeguard’s arrival in time to bring some of the Chris-Craft’s passengers, including that survivor, to shore was the result of a 911 call about a different boat, whose four passengers did not ultimately need assistance, Youngren said.
While the lifeguard worked to recover people from the water around the Chris-Craft, a supervising ranger, himself a former lifeguard in Southern California, arrived and stripped down to the swim trunks he was wearing under his uniform to help.
“I guess once you’re a lifeguard, you’re always a lifeguard,” said Youngren, who received a call about the ongoing effort at 3:27 p.m.
Adeline Yee, a spokesperson for California State Parks, said the agency’s first responders were not available for interviews.
A second woman from the Chris-Craft, besides the one the lifeguard rescued, made it to shore on her own, parks officials said. Both women, a mother-daughter pair identified on a GoFundMe page as Julie Lindsay and Amy Friduss, were soon transported to Barton Memorial Hospital. Both had been wearing life jackets, the search team from Washoe County, Nevada, later said on social media.
Lindsay and Friduss have not publicly described their experiences or what precisely led up to the capsizing. The Sacramento Bee could not reach them for comment.
A stylish boat that sells for well over $200,000, the Chris-Craft may have been especially unsuited to large, fast-paced waves.
Several experienced boaters pointed out that Pickles’ Chris-Craft appeared to have a low freeboard, the distance between the rim of the boat and the surface of the water. The front seating in a bowrider, they said, can let water fill the vessel more easily than in boats with a covered bow — and more quickly than a bilge pump may be able to rectify.
“Most likely they took a big wave, and that would be hard to avoid, and as soon as they have that kind of water in the boat, it’s going to go over pretty quickly, unless you’re real lucky,” said Drennan, the South Lake Tahoe fire chief. If water floods the engine and stops it from working, he added, “you’re a cork in the ocean.”
Authorities have not identified specific causes of death for the eight people who died.
“There are a number of ways you can die out on the lake,” Drennan said. “It can be blunt force trauma. It could be cold water exposure. It could be drowning.”
On the rocks
The El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office caught word of the capsized Chris-Craft shortly before 3 p.m. and “immediately responded to the area,” a news release from deputies would later say.
But after rescuing passengers from the Johnstons’ boat near Keys Marina, the South Lake Tahoe firefighters also had to go help the Sheriff’s Office’s own boat — Marine 3 — which was sending distress signals from around D.L. Bliss.
A video captured by Bogle, the firefighter, at 3:50 p.m. shows his crew’s boat en route from Keys Marina toward Rubicon Point. They approached the area at 4:07 p.m. — the timestamp of a second video taken by Bogle and reviewed by The Bee — and saw the Sheriff’s Office boat sitting against the rocks, next to the upside-down Chris-Craft.
“It clearly had been disabled and been pushed in by the waves,” Renner said. He presumed the trained deputies responding to the Chris-Craft had steered too close to the shore. The engine of the Sheriff’s Office boat was broken, according to Drennan.
“They clearly put their lives at risk to try to save some people, and the consequence was a damaged boat,” Renner added.
Sgt. Kyle Parker, a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Office, confirmed that the agency’s boat “did sustain damage.” He declined to elaborate or to answer most of The Bee’s additional questions, citing the agency’s ongoing investigation.
By the time the firefighters arrived, the two deputies operating the Sheriff’s Office boat were on the craggy shore, separated from each other by about 100 yards, Renner said.
“They were both very concerned about one another,” Bogle said. He happened to find a rescue surfboard, floating among other debris including life jackets, and used it to pick up one of the deputies, who seemed to be “freezing cold.” The firefighters brought both deputies to a U.S. Coast Guard boat, Renner said.
Bogle saw three bodies lying on a rock — Chris-Craft passengers who were neither living nor wearing life jackets at the time, he said — and helped move them onto a boat from the Tahoe Douglas Fire Protection District across the lake. That boat brought the bodies north around Rubicon Point to an incident command post set up at nearby Lester Beach.
Bogle could only imagine what the Chris-Craft’s older passengers had experienced. “That’s just a terrible place to be, kind of an elderly person in the water against the rocks,” Bogle said.
At the time, he did not know that three other bodies had already been recovered or that two survivors had been taken to a hospital. But it soon became clear that two more Chris-Craft riders were unaccounted for.
A search began in earnest, the firefighters said, led by their boat and those present from four other agencies: the South Lake Tahoe police, the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office, the North Lake Tahoe Fire Protection District and the Tahoe Douglas Fire Protection District.
The officers used a search pattern in which boats snaked back and forth, moving outward from the shoreline, in increasingly long lines parallel to it, Renner said.
The fire crew was lucky that day to have “one of our absolute best boat operators” as the engineer and “one of our absolute best swimmers” in Bogle, Renner said. “It was an absolute blessing from God.”
By the time the five boats were scanning for the missing, the waters had calmed considerably.
Drennan took a photo on his phone at 4:30 p.m. showing a flat lake and a mostly clear, blue sky. In the foreground of the image sits the Johnston family’s overturned boat — a sign of disturbance in the otherwise pristine scene.
Grief and reckoning
It would take two days to find the two missing people, each at depths of over 300 feet below the surface, according to the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office, which deployed an underwater rover. And on Tuesday, June 24, the eight victims’ names were released on the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page, intensifying the world’s attention on a birthday party gone terribly wrong.
Friends and family mourned the dead. Ravi Inukonda, DoorDash’s chief financial officer, highlighted in a statement the “contagious spirit” of his colleague Josh Pickles. In addition to Pickles and his parents — his father Terry Pickles, 73, and Bozinovich, who lived in Redwood City — there was his 72-year-old uncle Peter Bayes, from Lincoln.
Timothy O’Leary, 71, from Auburn, showed his passion for cars on social media. Theresa Giullari, 66, and James “Jim” Guck, 69, were remembered in online obituaries as an energetic couple from Honeoye, New York, who had attended high school together and filled their later years with social and outdoor activity.
And Stephen Lindsay — husband to Julie Lindsay, father to Amy Friduss and a resident of Springwater, New York, age 63 — was “the most amazing person,” his sister Diane wrote on Facebook. She recently asked her followers to listen to the song “Magic Power” by the band Triumph while imagining “Zippy,” as Stephen was nicknamed, playing an air guitar and air drums.
Around Lake Tahoe, people cleaned up the visible remnants of the storm and grappled with the losses it caused. Boats that washed up on South Lake Tahoe’s Conolley Beach had to be removed, and boating safety precautions such as life jackets had to be emphasized, especially during the south shore’s busiest weekend of the year.
Neither eyewitnesses nor authorities have said whether the eight people who died June 21 were wearing life jackets when the Chris-Craft capsized.
Frequent boaters have gotten texts from old friends checking in. Steve Buttling, who captained the Blue Warrior that Saturday, said his wife recently fielded a call from a scheduled charter client who was worried about going out on Tahoe after seeing news of the deaths.
“She just reassured them that this was once in a, you know, great while,” he said.
On Capitol Hill, five days after the storm, Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Roseville, said the National Transportation Safety Board was investigating “all aspects of the accident.”
Kiley, whose district includes California’s Tahoe area and two of the victims’ homes, said a preliminary report could be expected within weeks, but it might take up to two years before the full probe was completed and a report released. A spokesperson for the NTSB did not respond to a request for comment.
Even as teams searched on the afternoon of June 22 for the two people missing near D.L. Bliss, representatives from a bevy of agencies involved in the prior day’s response gathered for a formal debrief meeting at the South Lake Tahoe police headquarters.
“To hear everybody’s perspective about it later, and understand how significant of an event it was for everybody,” Renner said, “makes it feel like, you know, you’re not alone.”
Crivelli, the South Lake Tahoe police spokesperson, praised the first responders’ work and cautioned against comparing the outcomes for the two boats that capsized, each with 10 people aboard. Danielle Johnston and her guests, with rescue boats immediately at hand, all survived; Josh Pickles and his guests mostly did not.
“Any time that people jump into action, when they put their own lives at risk, you know, doing that stuff is heroic,” Crivelli said. “That doesn’t discredit what happened out at D.L. Bliss. It is a different set of circumstances.
“We can’t control when tragedy strikes.”
A painful place
Tragedy struck quietly in Tahoma. Ken and Emilie Corcoran arrived home from a visit to Donner Memorial State Park and saw a Sheriff’s Office car parked on the street that evening. Early news reports of a deadly Chris-Craft accident kept them anxious and restless all night. Sugar-Carlsgaard confirmed their worst fears in a text Sunday morning.
“No words can express the pain and anguish we feel knowing their lives were lost during what was meant to be a joyful time on the lake,” Sugar-Carlsgaard later wrote in a statement, thanking the first responders. Singer said Sugar-Carlsgaard would not do any interviews.
Standing on their front stoop last week — near a wooden sign Ken Corcoran carved to say “Ta-Home-Ah..” — the Corcorans reminisced about seeing Pickles and Sugar-Carlsgaard’s newborn for the first time between Christmas and New Year’s. Emilie Corcoran gave the young family a children’s book about wildlife in the Sierra. Josh Pickles offered some sourdough starter in case they wanted to join in his new hobby.
The Corcorans met as teenagers vacationing by Tahoe with their families, and they have long come there with their children and grandchildren.
“Looking out at that lake has always been such a peaceful, calming, wonderful, beautiful thing,” Emilie Corcoran said. “And right now I’m looking out at that lake with a little bit of a different feeling. It’s kind of a little menacing-looking.”
Sugar-Carlsgaard’s parents and sister joined her in Tahoma that Sunday morning, Ken Corcoran said. They spent the day packing up and drove off that evening, according to vacationers occupying a rental house next door.
“We wonder if we’ll ever see her again,” Emilie Corcoran said. “This isn’t the kind of place that a single mom with a baby is going to come by herself. I just can’t imagine that.”
Her husband chimed in: “I think they bought this to be a family home.”
This story was originally published July 4, 2025 at 12:13 PM with the headline "Capsized: Lives upended and lives saved during ‘freak’ storm on Lake Tahoe."
