In the pre-dawn hours, the avalanche center’s Allyn, 49, saddles up his pick-up truck with ski gear like he does roughly three times a week each winter to make the reverse commute from his Green Lake home to the mountains.

Allyn has worked in Washington’s outdoor industry since he moved here from Massachusetts to study at the University of Puget Sound in the late 1980s. He took a year off from college to ski patrol at Crystal, then worked his way into mountain guiding. A climbing accident in Canada that broke both his feet ended his guiding career, but he found a niche in avalanche education — teaching courses on how to identify and avoid avalanche hazards — and eventually, in professional observation. He works as a carpenter in the off-season, but hopes to return to NWAC full-time next winter.

Allyn’s field observations are essential to the forecast’s mix, and last week he took a routine trip to the backcountry near Crystal Mountain ski resort. Responsible for the central and southern Cascades, including Snoqualmie Pass, Mt. Rainier, and White Pass, some reports of skier-triggered avalanches — with no burials — had piqued his interest to check out conditions firsthand.

The bumper-to-bumper headlights on I-5 North soon melded into the strip mall detritus of Auburn, which gave way to Enumclaw horse country. Outside of Greenwater, the rain turned to light snow and blanketed the evergreens with a white sheen.

“I’m pretty tired right now, to be honest,” Allyn, who has the taciturn nature of someone who spends a lot of solitary time in the mountains, admitted on the way. “The last month has been quite busy and we’ve had a lot of near-misses and a number of avalanche fatalities. The combination of physical, mental and emotional fatigue is definitely setting in.”

Jeremy Allyn saws down the snow in a test pit to check for stability.

Allyn had attended a celebration of life for Suokko the day before and another for his girlfriend’s co-worker, who perished in the Methow Valley slide, a few weeks earlier. After the heavy load this season, the avalanche center is looking to put a trauma and grief counselor on retainer for future incidents.

But there was still a job to do, and Allyn was on the trail using alpine touring skis with climbing skins even before Crystal’s lifts began operating for the day. Over the course of four hours, Allyn explored the weekend’s avalanches in Bullion Basin, where two crowns, the clearly visible line left on the snow when a slope slides, stood out with ski tracks running above and below.

Equipped with a pack stocked with avalanche observation gear, Allyn picked two spots to dig four-feet deep pits. Allyn has the lean build one would expect from someone who climbs mountains for a living, and he had the pit dug and shaved to a clean surface in minutes — one suspects he’d be handy to dig out a buried car — revealing a snow profile like a sedimentary rock or tree-ring growth: a cross-section that reveals change over time.

Thin lines running horizontally indicated rain storms over the last few months of winter weather that were buried in the snowpack. On the surface, skiers might know these as rain crusts that make for bad skiing. Once buried, these so-called “weak layers” might not hold when skiers or a snowmobile glide on top of them, causing the entire snowpack above to slide.

In 30 years of mountain travel, Allyn has never been caught in an avalanche that buried him — setting off small, controlled avalanches is sometimes part of the job — though he says he did help rescue a guiding client once in British Columbia’s Valhalla Mountains.

Using the shovel to tap the snow and see its reaction to pressure, it took three tries and maximum force to get a foot-deep cube of snow to slide off the most recent rain crust — a good sign the fresh powder was bonding well to the snowpack beneath it, at least at this elevation and aspect.

Different snowfalls can be identified in the snowpack, like slices in a layer cake.

The day’s field work completed, Allyn transitioned into downhill mode and zipped down the face of Blue Bell Knoll, a slope already laced with s-marks from the weekend’s backcountry ski crowd — the kind that depend on NWAC’s forecasts to make decisions about how to balance avalanche risk with good-quality skiing.

And by mid-afternoon, camped out at an Enumclaw coffee shop, Allyn filed his daily report so that the forecasters back at Sand Point could add it to the list of data points that would inform the next day’s forecast.

While the idea of getting paid to traipse around the mountains might sound appealing to aspiring ski bums, Allyn must be out there even in frigid cold or soaking rain. Over the course of a season, especially one with multiple avalanche investigations, that routine takes its toll.

Although Allyn mostly sticks to the technical language of his craft, regularly using phrases like “party members,” “uphill mode,” and “mitigate your hazard,” he does get a bit more personal. He admits that the life-and-death decisions that result from his contribution to the forecast are “constantly” on his mind.

“Last year was the first time I was doing a lot of incident reporting and wrapping my brain around the human side of what can happen,” he said. “Interviewing loved ones and partners and fully investigating these incidents, you can’t help but look at them from a perspective of, hey, this could be my friends or my partners, or me.”