Alpental Valley

We were pleasantly surprised by the travel conditions up the Alpental Valley. There are still plenty of early-season hazards like open creeks and boulders, but we found we could move through them with some thoughtful navigation. Low in the valley we saw plenty of roller balls on steep slopes of all aspects. We traveled up to 4600' where we found the 4-5in of snow from earlier in the week to be drier than lower in the valley. A thin surface crust kept wind transport minimal, though we did observe some blowing snow in exposed terrain. Although the flat light perhaps limited our ability to see more subtle signs, there was not any obvious evidence of avalanches on neighboring slopes. We did encounter one very petite slide (crown 2ft across ~3in deep), which appeared to have slid on the uppermost of the many melt-freeze crusts in the upper snowpack.  

In the upper snowpack, numerous melt-freeze crust layers are sandwiched between lower density snow. We found one grouping of crust sandwiches 10cm below the surface, under the 12/25-26 snow, and another grouping 30cm from the surface. Some of these crusts were stout water ice, while others were thinner and weaker. We dug to ground, finding the lower 80 cm of the snowpack to be moist, relativley uniform in density, and showing no layers of concern.