“The weirdest things about Sitka are its volcanos. When I looked
out the cabin window at dawn, the first sights that grabbed my eyes
were Mt. Edgecumbe and Crater Ridge, a pair of volcanos clearly of
recent vintage. Anything much older than 10,000 years would have
been scarred or scraped away completely by ice age glaciers. Mt.
Edgecumbe stands around 3200 feet high, and it’s the Mt. Fuji of
Sitka. It not only resembles Mt. Fuji but shares with it a shape
and composition typical of volcanos near subduction faults, where
one lithospheric plate slides under another. Alaska features one of
the world’s longest faults, along the Aleutian archipelago; but it
starts more than 1,000 miles to the west of Sitka. So Mt. Edgecumbe
just sits there looking like it belongs in Hawaii.“Mt. Edgecumbe hasn’t been active for more than two hundred
years, although smoke did rise from the volcano on April Fools Day
in 1995, when Porky Oliver Pickar torched fifty tires in the
caldera…”