Punchy wind slab snow near Talking Mountain.

      I toured up to Talking mountain today. On the drive up I spotted several wet loose debris piles above the road on Echo summit. On the trailhead I could feel a punchy 4F stiffer layer 10cm thick just below the surface, beneath it was fist hard snow and was widespread through out my tour. The stiffer layer seemed like a density change from wind/temperature combo at tail end of storm. The surface grains on the way up was a mix of rimmed grains and small surface hoar on all aspects and all the way up to the summit of Talking. In general there was around 30cms of new snow within this area. I did probe around and found HS of 130cms on the solar aspects and 160-200cms on the shaded aspects above 8000'. Once I reached the ridge line towards Becker and Talking more wind effected snow was present along the way. This is were I started to find wind slabs of different thickness from thin veneer layers up to 6" thick. When I got to some of the smaller wind features were slabs were present I was able to get some snow to release while jumping on it but, it was stubborn hard slabs. Once triggered It did release larger chunks that rolled for quite a ways down the slope. I stopped @ 8000' on a N aspect and  completed a few shovel tilt tests and had planar results just under the  4F stiffer layer. As I wrapped around the S aspects to Talking some tree bombs started around 1100 but was only from direct sunlight and wasn't raining out of every tree. Once I made it up to the summit of Talking I could see that both upper and lower Echo had froze over. I could also see into the Crystal range and looked for recent avalanches but only saw one on the E facing aspect of Mt. Ralston. From there I went down the N face of Talking and dug a pit. I had a few results in my compression tests, one just below the 4F stiffer layer (planar Q1) and one about 60cms down (Q2) on a rain crust from Thursday weather event. Below the crust was a thin layer of graupel and F hard snow. It did not appear to be surface hoar but more like near surface facets. I moved on to an ECT and had only ECTNS as a result on both layers. From there I bounced back over and rode the S facing aspects down to HWY 50. The snow had warmed up a little but still rode like colder snow all the way to the HWY. There were only a couple sticky areas were the sun was providing direct radiation. Even down low tree bombs were minimal on this aspect.