Observation: Chugach State Park

Had our sights on Mt.Significant today, backed off short of the summit and skied our skin track back down.
Snow on more protected northern aspects was generally soft, but also had a deep base of rotten facets that made the bottom drop out sometimes while skiing. Less protected zones, such as ridge lines, had a stiff-but-decomposing crust underneath a few inches of new snow, and then loose facets under that. This crust would sometimes collapse and whumpf loudly from the combined weight of two skinners, or when the third skinner in the track passed. This gave us low confidence that we could identify where a crust might fail or not once in steeper terrain, and all the steeper terrain had terrain traps in this zone. We kept our slope angles below 25deg on the retreat.

Southern aspects have been cooked hard in the sun. We saw several old wet avalanches on southerly aspects, some D2 in size that exposed bare ground.

Creek and river crossing are failing fast with the sun/heat.