Shooting Cracks and New Snow on Tamarack Peak

The weather started to clear as we started to skin around mid-morning. By midday mostly sunny skies existed over the Mt. Rose area (see photo of Relay Peak). We could see large cornices looming over the far east ridge of Tamarack Peak and in other wind-loaded areas. We found some smaller wind-loaded test slopes and ski kicks on a few of these triggered shooting cracks that failed at the bottom of a wind slab about 2 ft deep. The largest of these cracks shot about 20 ft from the front and back of my skis (see photo for the one in front of my skis) but the test slope did not release. We also kicked some small cornices off above small test slopes and these broke easily. some of them caused some small cracking in the slopes below them but some of them did not. None of them triggered any wind slabs. In sheltered non-wind-affected terrain, we did not see any signs of lingering storm snow instabilities.