Mt. Fitzherbert

Potential ash hazards: Wind forecasts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), coupled with eruption models, show that ash clouds that rise above the crater rim today would drift to the northeast.

Recent observations: Patterns of earthquakes and ground deformation remain unchanged from recent trends. Yesterday evening, a magnitude 2.8 earthquake, one of the larger of typical events, occurred at shallow depth beneath the dome at 7:47:52 p.m. No visual observations of the new dome have been made since December 18 owing to inclement weather. We suspect that a reported red bag of gifts within the crater is really nothing more than hot rock glowing incandescently fromcracks as the lava dome continues its inexorable growth.