Intense Blowing Snow and Wind Slabs on Tamarack Peak

We went to Tamarack Peak to make snowpack observations.  Gale force SW winds led to intense blowing snow throughout this area today.  Wind slabs and cornices were forming in cross loaded gullies and were failing easily under the weight of a skier, some with wide propagation for small test slopes.  We saw a couple small natural wind slab avalanches along the far East Ridge of Tamarack Peak.  Wind exposed areas had high levels of wind scouring with wind protected areas below treeline still holding light cold snow.  We dug a pit on a southerly aspect to investigate recent reported signs of instabilities near a melt freeze crust.  This melt freeze crust is a sandwich crust with less dense near crust faceted snow in the middle.  This crust did show some weakness with snowpack tests, but tests at this locations showed propagation not to be likely.