Shooting cracks on Talking Mountain

Incredibly strong North/ North East winds on the ridge of Talking Mountain this morning around 10:00 AM, with a great deal of wind transport of the newly fallen 3 inches of snow. At times, gusts were strong enough to knock over a person. 

We observed very large amounts of wind transport coming off of Echo, Angora and Flagpole. Temps were well below freezing for the duration of our trip.

As we travelled up the ridge towards Becket Peak (prior to entering avalanche terrain), our skin track crossed wind slabs that ranged from 4 to 15 inches in depth. We observed shooting cracks in these wind slabs on multiple occasions.

After making these observations, we chose to turn around well below Beckett peak. We wanted to avoid skinning across the steeper (30+ degrees) south-facing slopes that the skin track normally traverses at higher elevations on this route, as the wind loading and shooting cracks had us concerned about instability.