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Fresh snow, beautiful weather, and the holiday break have done a great job of getting folks out on the hill at Hatcher Pass. At least half a dozen people were observed climbing every established skin track at the pass. Skiers and riders are out enjoying the road run and the Archangel lot is full of Nordic skiers. With an impressive number of tracks on Marmot, Eldorado, and Hatch, the most notable observation was the lack of skier-triggered or natural avalanche activity. We were most grateful to observe a lack of widespread wind effect from yesterday's forecasted strong winds. It appeared that the conditions never really materialized for these winds to mix in with the valley's stable weather and produce strong winds on the ground. We observed some interesting scouring and natural activity related to yesterday's wind on Frostbite and in the Government Peak Basin, but this was isolated in distribution and small in size.  

A few cold clear days have again driven faceting within the snowpack and a nice layer of loud-pow was observed on shady and sheltered slopes. Overall the snowpack structure remains unchanged with mostly faceted grains and variability with several distributed crusts to be found throughout the area. We dug on a NW aspect at 3700' and found the following: HS 60cm, no recent wind loading or new wind slab formation in this location, new faceting snow from 11/25-26 on the surface sitting on top of a firm wind slab, sitting on numerous large facets from Oct, on top of a couple facet/crust layers. We found no instabilities or failures in our pit today.  We did not observe any red flags on our tour.