We have continued to closely monitor the South Lake Tahoe region’s weather forecast and air quality index (AQI) over the past few days. After connecting with many of you and taking into account the counsel of medical professionals, we have made the difficult decision to cancel this weekend’s hike.

Over the past week, we have connected with most of you, our emergency response teams, medical professionals and local Lake Tahoe residents and took each of your thoughts and recommendations into serious consideration as we made this decision. Based on the collective feedback and the forecasts, our team wanted to make the decision sooner rather than later, especially since we know many of you planned to travel for this event.

Our team will roll over each participant to next year’s Trailblaze event. Your current funds raised will transfer over to next year. Should you have any outstanding offline gifts that still need to be processed, we will add those to your fundraising total.

It is important to note that we will not charge participants the remaining amount of funds needed for their personal fundraising following the stated deadline of August 30 in your Recommitment Packet.

Because everyone will be considered a rollover participant due to these unexpected circumstances, we will honor the amount you have raised thus far and will transfer that amount towards next year’s hike event. 

We understand this is a disappointing outcome, but we greatly appreciate your willingness to be flexible throughout the past few weeks. This event holds a very special place in our hearts, as do all of you for everything you’ve done to make the Trailblaze Challenge what it has become.

We hope that you will join us in considering this a postponement, not a cancellation. We can’t wait to finish this journey with each of you. We’ve come too far to not see it through. To that end, we have already begun to explore moving our Trailblaze event to the Spring or early Summer months to avoid fire season. Once we solidify our plan, we will be sure to share those event details with all of you in preparation for next year.

This event has been an incredible opportunity to get to know all of you and I am so grateful for the memories we’ve made thus far.

Should you have any questions about rolling over to next year’s event or any suggestions for our Trailblaze 2022 event, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me! I can’t wait for us to all come together for Trailblaze 2022!

More details to come soon. From all of us at Make-A-Wish, thank you.