Featured Article Summary #175

Eve Cone, also called Eve’s Cone, is a cinder cone volcano in northwestern British Columbia, Canada. It sits at 1,740 meters elevation in the Desolation Lava Field on the Big Raven Plateau, within Mount Edziza Provincial Park near Telegraph Creek. During the Holocene, it produced about a 12 km lava flow that ran down the northern side of the plateau and later split into smaller channels, with the largest reaching Buckley Lake. Eve Cone is part of the larger Mount Edziza volcanic complex, which includes many types of volcanic landforms like shield volcanoes, stratovolcanoes, lava domes, and other cinder cones. The volcano has a circular summit crater about 45 meters deep, but most of its lava came from vents around the base of the roughly 350-meter-wide cone. Nearby volcanic features include Tsekone Ridge, Pillow Ridge, Sidas Cone, and the Triplex Cones, and the area can be reached by horse trails or by flying to Buckley Lake and continuing from there. Geologist Jack Souther studied the Mount Edziza area from 1965 to 1992 and named the cone after Eve Brown Edzerza, a Tahltan woman known for surviving a deadly avalanche on the mountain after her husband Johnny Edzerza and Hank Williams were killed in a violent snowstorm. Her survival and rescue-story became a local legend. Eve Cone was officially named on January 2, 1980, and was mapped and recorded by Canadian geography offices; Souther later identified it as DLF-9 in his 1992 report, meaning it is the ninth youngest eruptive centre in the Desolation Lava Field. Eve Cone is a volcanic cone in northwestern British Columbia, Canada, located in the Cassiar Land District about 11 km southeast of Buckley Lake. It sits at 1,740 m elevation in the Desolation Lava Field within the Mount Edziza volcanic complex, and is known as one of Canada’s most symmetrical and well-preserved cinder cones, rising 172 m to a deep circular summit crater. Sparse lichen and pioneer plants grow on its base. Nearby volcanic features include Tsekone Ridge, Pillow Ridge, the Triplex Cones, and Sidas Cone, and Eve Cone is within Mount Edziza Provincial Park, established in 1972 to protect this large volcanic landscape. Eve Cone is part of the Mount Edziza volcanic complex within a large volcanic region called the Northern Cordilleran Volcanic Province, stretching from northwestern British Columbia into Yukon and eastern Alaska. Volcanoes here mainly form from alkali basalts and hawaiites, along with several other rock types, and they have erupted from about 20 million years ago to just a few hundred years ago. This long-lasting volcanism is believed to be caused by rifting in the North American Cordillera linked to changes in how the North American and Pacific plates move relative to each other. Eve Cone is a small, monogenetic cinder cone that formed during one short eruptive phase, likely within the Holocene. It is made of hawaiite from the Big Raven Formation and is one of the two youngest volcanic centres in the Desolation Lava Field, with Williams Cone nearby about 6 km to the southeast. Its symmetrical shape suggests it formed from a tall, vertical lava fountain, and its outer slopes are covered with volcanic ejecta like bombs, cinders, and ash. On the north side, finer dark-grey bombs and cinders dominate, while the more eroded south side shows coarser clinkery spatter. Erosion is stronger on the south flank, possibly due to more extreme temperature swings causing frost wedging and soil movement, and unlike Williams Cone, Eve Cone’s surrounding ash has been completely removed—indicating Eve Cone is older.