Straddling the southern Yukon and northern British Columbia, the extensively glaciated Boreal Cordillera ecozone abounds in superlatives. Some of Canada’s highest mountains tower here. Here, too, can be found Canada’s largest non-polar icefields and longest glaciers, as well as 100-450 metre deep canyons, through which surge

powerful rivers like the Stikine and Alsek.

Much of this zone is geologically young, especially around 2787 metre high Mount Edziza, a volcano that last erupted over four million years ago. Reminders of this event and subsequent volcanic activity remain in the numerous domes and cinder cones that punctuate a plateau built up by basaltic lava flows. At the northern end of this plateau, a lava field called Desolation extends for over 150 square kilometres, in the middle of which rises the beautifully symmetrical Eve Cone.

The Klondike Plateau, in the northern part of the Boreal Cordillera, has the area’s coldest temperatures, with a mean of -23°C in the winter. Throughout the zone, mean temperatures range from 9.5°C to11.5°C in the summer and -13°C to -23°C in the winter. Precipitation varies. It is lowest, at 300 millimetres or less, in the valleys just east of the coastal mountains; and highest, at up to 1500 millimetres, in the elevated, easternmost areas, where much of the precipitation falls as snow.