Observation: Seward

Not sure this is worth posting, but we topped out at 4010 feet in the Carter Lake area yesterday and i just wanted to pass along the snow conditions we found before this round of snowfall. Pretty much across the board, the set up we encountered was melt freeze crust on top, and faceted snow below. The crust varied from breakable to bulletproof. North facing slopes from 2100-3100 feet consisted of a melt freeze on top, 2″ of facets, another melt freeze with about 8″ of facets below that. We skied a south/southeast facing slope from 4010 feet down to 2000 feet. The south facing slope had a mixed bag of surface conditions from bullet proof to breakable to soft facetted snow, but over all it seemed to be less faceted than the north facing, and from 3000-2000 actually was sun affected and soft snow! 2 point releases of wet snow were seen on this south facing slope as well as a glide avalanche that did not release far due to the shallow depth of the snow (12inches) this was all below 3000 ft. Above 4000 feet slopes were too sharky for our tolerance, and appeared to have less snow than 3000-4000 ft elevations.