The Nisga'a Lava Beds
On the Nass River, British Columbia, Canada
The Tseax Lava Flow, Canada's most recent, occurred about 300 hundred years ago, burying two Native villages of the Nass tribe, known as the Nisga'a. It is located on the Nass Forest Service road that cuts diagonally from Terrace to the Cassiar Highway, and is protected as the Nisga'a Memorial Lava Bed Park, managed jointly by the Nisga'a and BC Parks. Interpretive signs are in both English and Nisga'a.
The eruption that created the flow seems to have been of the effusive Hawaiian type, where lava simply flows out of the earth with few pyrotechnics. This may explain why as many as 2000 of the Nisga'a in two villages perished in the eruption. The flow, about six miles long and one or two wide, dammed a small stream and created deep, clear Lava Lake. Natural revegetation of the massive basalt flows has proceeded slowly, with an abundance of lichens and a few cottonwoods in deep cracks, but not much else.
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