Observation: NWAC Forecaster

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Weather Summary

Beautiful sunny morning in the Alpental Valley. Was warm throughout the day, but really started to feel the heat as we exited the field around noon.

There are debris piles everywhere around the valley with shallow slabs visible along with loose slides. Many crowns have filled in a bit but are still visible. Most of these were from the AR event earlier this week.

A few notable or fun avalanches;
Got a look at some of the upper slopes of Chair and saw plenty of recent crowns that broke widely and connected terrain features - explaining the large amount of debris in the Source Lake basin. Did not get a good look at the Upper Chair Peak Basin to see if there is a crown in there, but I suspect there is.
There is a "postage stamp" slab right in the middle of Great Scott Bowl
A slide coming out of the cliffs on the climbers right side of Great Scott Bowl scoured down to an old surface where frozen ski tracks had been buried.
We were able to initiate one "pushalanche" with the surface snow on a test slope. It did not gauge down into older layers.

Snowpack Observations

Variable conditions are again the name of the game at the pass. There is firm debris, sun softened debris, firm crusts with a few inches of low-density snow on top, breakable sun crusts with about an inch of snow on top, rain runnels of varying softness, and as the day wore on, heavier and wetter snow that was softened by the sun. In most locations, the surface is very rough and beat up from the recent AR event.