Quick report
What a beautiful day for a walk! I headed up the Alpental Valley up to the Thumbtack and over to the North Slope of Chair Peak. I traveled down to the top of the Cache Couloir before reversing my track and heading back to the car the way I came. As noted below, the snow was already getting warm and sticky as I ascended with small natural wet avalanche activity spotted as snow shed from rocks, trees, and cliffs. The largest slide may have approached a D1.5.
The pleasant surprise was to find soft, dry snow on the shaded half of the compass. With some gusty winds, this dry snow was being sifted around, but no actual wind slabs were spotted where I traveled. The soft snow skied well but was poorly bonded to the crust. You likely would have been able to trigger a dry loose in the right terrain.
As I popped back to the sunny side of the ridge, the snow was ripe for the pushing, and that's what I did. Every ski turn on a steep slope produced a loose avalanche that slid easily on the crust and grew in size as it descended. It was easy to predict and manage, but I was cognizant of pushing snow that could have run through the cliffs onto unsuspecting folks below.
Coverage is still low, with lots of holes and a few creek crossings required. More than once I found that the new snow was just covering rocks that were likely exposed only a few days ago.
Overall, the skiing was fun, and triggering some small avalanches brought me a little joy and made the ski out engaging.
Plenty of signs of wet avalanche activity on sun-exposed slopes. Both natural and human-triggered slides were observed. I was easily triggering wet loose slides on my descent around 12:30.Weather
Low-level clouds gave way to mostly sunny skies higher up. There was a breezy, cool easterly wind.
Snowpack
The snowpack is fairly simple to understand right now. There is recent new snow overlaying a stout melt-freeze crust. Below this crust, you'll find moist melt forms of varying sizes mixed with older crusts.
What was only a cm or two of new snow near the parking lot grew to around 10-12cm at Source Lake. As I climbed higher, I consistently found around 16-17cm of new snow over the crust on both the Source Lake and Snow Lake side of Chair Peak.
The 2/7 crust has melded with other melt-freeze crusts to form one large complex. It was roughly 20cm thick and burly. It was ski and boot supportable everywhere I traveled today.