Quick report
Parked before the trailhead and got going at 5 am. Traveled up through locked up snow to above 6k' where we found an inch or two of what seemed like either fresh snow or wind carry. Descended off Gash Point through a breakable crust just covered by the new snow. The sun was blasting all morning, and felt like we were in an oven as we climbed above Bear Lake. Luckily the wind and clouds blew in, so we continued to the north slopes of Sky Pilot, following another party. Didn't find evidence of the PWL sun crust on these slopes, just a lot of slowly warming powder. Dug a hand pit and pulled on things and around 4" down, there was a cohesive layer of what felt like storm slab releasing on a soft bed surface (not a crust). It didn't seem very reactive so we continued. Tagged the summit and then hustled out, finding surprisingly great turns on what felt like classic PNW wet pow. The party before us had some dry loose sluffing on their shaded line, but our lines didn't show any instability. The clouds and wind held through the afternoon, and as we climbed out of the Bear drainage, we watched a variety of avalanches sluffing on the east slopes. Found a few decent turns in Gash Bowl before things got too heavy, and we spent at least 2k' descending through grabby peanut-butter snow barely needing to make turns. The skin track is still basically intact to the lower TH except for a few bare patches. Overall, feels like we need some good freeze thaws before we're really into corn season, but a great day out anyway.
Avalanche
We saw a lot of avy debris and activity on this tour. Saw crowns from slab releases on a variety of aspects, including near the approach to MiniGash (Arden referenced this one last week), high climbers left in the main Gash Bowl, and a huge release on one of the ridges off Glen Lake Peak. In the Bear Lake drainage, there was a ton of debris on all slopes from loose wets, cornice failures, and glide failures on rock slabs. It was pretty quiet out there in the morning, but avy activity in the drainage picked up around noon as we were exiting. We watched some big sluffs off Sky Pilot and even watched a glide avalanche release off a rock slab, all on east-facing slopes. Despite all this, we didn't set off any loose wets on the traverse back up to Gash due to the breakable crust an inch or two down, which seemed to be holding things together.