The snow swept in with a vengeance early this winter, and with four new lifts, a new hotel, a revamped base area and a spacious children’s center and ski school, among other recent investments, everything was coming together.

Then disaster struck.

On Jan. 17, two skiers were descending a chute off the flank of Kachina Peak — a steep, above-tree-line, experts-only zone within the area’s boundaries that had been opened for skiing — when an avalanche broke loose, burying them in tens of feet of snow. Members of the Taos ski patrol were on the scene instantly, organizing a search with hundreds of volunteers. Using probes and shovels, they found and extracted the victims from the frozen debris. But the two skiers, Corey Borg-Massanari, 22, who grew up in Minnesota and was living in Vail, Colo., and Matthew Zonghetti, 26, of Mansfield, Mass., both died after being taken to separate hospitals.

The powder was fresh and deep on the day in question, and before opening the steeps for skiing the Taos ski patrol had set off explosives throughout the upper mountain and specifically in the area that slid to test the snowpack’s stability and release dangerous snow layers should they be prone to avalanche.

The accident sent shock waves through the industry, where ski areas with avalanche-prone steeps make similar calls daily. Although avalanche accidents — and deaths — occur almost every season in the North American backcountry, they are uncommon inside resort areas where trained ski patrols carefully monitor and manage the snowpack.

A week before, I’d skied directly beneath the K3 chute where the avalanche would come down. Almost 30 years ago to the week, in January of 1989, a massive avalanche crashed down the face of Kachina in the same area. Mr. Blake, the mountain’s co-founder, had died that month, and Mother Nature responded a week later with a blizzard of biblical proportions, setting up dangerous avalanche conditions. “Ernie’s Storm,” as locals still refer to it, had led to the closure of much of the upper mountain, so that slide fortunately harmed no one.

The slopes of Kachina Peak had long been open only to those willing to hike up to the resort’s highest point, at 12,481 feet. A new chair up the peak was Mr. Bacon’s first investment. It opened in 2015, signaling the new owner’s commitment to adventure skiing and to the memory of Mr. Blake, who had long envisioned the lift. But the new chairlift was not without controversy. Some locals regarded Kachina as terrain too challenging for people unwilling to hoof it. Resort officials had no comment as to whether the men who died hiked to their starting point or rode the lift.