skuzie

Hey all, I'm a newbie to glacier travel. I've taken the AAI/Institute AMTL1 course where we spent a week learning glacier travel and crevasse rescue. After our summit bid, I spent a couple hours with a guide doing a glacier tour where I was instructed on identifying snow bridges and crevasses. We were out early May, so a lot of the features were subtle. Last week I summitted Sahale Peak via the Sahale Glacier with a four person team so we could rope up for the glacier. The boot pack crossed two obvious snow bridges and one smaller one. In May, one of our guides fell into a crevasse up to his waist on the Easton Glacier when a snow bridge collapsed. From the top, that collapsing snow bridge didn't look much different from those on Sahale. On this website and in person I see a lot of people mentioning that they do that route without any rope. I'm wondering, how do you evaluate the conditions effectively to make that decision? There were definite and obvious snow bridges to cross, so why is unroped travel so common? What terrain features or other markers do teams use to determine that a glacier is safe to cross unroped?