My party observed a variety of types of avalanches in Apollo couloir this morning. There was debris from dry loose avalanches that appeared to have sluffed off the cliffs and then entrained some of the new snow in the upper half of the chute, but what was more interesting to me was the debris from what appeared to be multiple fairly recent glide avalanches off of the north facing slabs lining the chute. There were refrigerator-sized chunks of rock-hard debris (photo 1) that easily could crush some bones if someone was unfortunate enough to get caught in the path of those things. They weren't particularly fun to ski over either. These were partially buried by new snow which indicates the avalanches ran before this current storm cycle. See photo 2 for a picture showing the crown of 2 of these avalanches. If you zoom in on photo 1 you can see the crown of the biggest of this type of avalanche we observed in the background.

Conditions aside from the avalanche debris were not particularly stable. Down low there was a thick layer of graupel on the surface, and at around 7300' where the chute doglegs to the right towards the West Slabs a 3"-thick slab had formed on top of that graupel layer. At about the time we made that observation, the snowfall rate increased significantly and the visibility fell to about 20 feet as we were enveloped in a cloud, so my party decided it was wise to turn around. There was debris from a new snow avalanche running almost all the way from the top of the couloir from that spot anyway (photo 3) so we aren't sure if the skiing would've been particularly good. The surface graupel layer below skied like a dream once we got below the chunder