If you can tell for sure from the available imagery that "Dan's Smoker" is not a smoker, then I humbly yield to your superior ability to clarify the murky!

Gracious!

My initial argument about this feature (back when God was a boy) was that we were seeing sunlight reflected off a cliff-face that connected the smaller mound with the larger. Others worked long and hard to enhance the relatively putrid image. Results were ambiguous. While there was some doubt about whether a plume of vapor or smoke would take such a narrow form in the near-vacuum of the Martian atmosphere, there was little indication that my interpretation of the feature as a cliff face was correct. Others, scouring the various Elysium Fossae, saw many mounds and hills, many with flow features like the one we're contemplating here.

Whether this is an active vent or not is impossible to determine (IMESHO) from this image -- which in the original is quite poor, for those keeping score.

If there were other images of this particular formation, we might be able to tell. But it looks like our friends have not trained the MOC on it since the initial image was obtained in 1997. What a shame.

Nevertheless, the THEMIS has done some exploring in the same general area.

This is a nightime IR imageof a trough near the one we're talking about... in fact, it may be the same one, though not the same location. There could be some anomalous heat sources in the image. I can't tell. Can you?

Cheers, BRFelix