Yukon, Ho! | Alberta Venture Stops Over in Whitehorse

Destination: Whitehorse

by Craille Maguire Gillies

WHITEHORSE REDUX: Downtown Whitehorse sports some rustic storefronts reminiscent of the old west

In Whitehorse, around the corner from Starbucks and Tim Hortons and not far from the city’s spiffed up riverfront, you’ll find a kitschy sign in bright yellow letters evoking the fever of earlier times: Learn How to Pan for Gold. It’s posted outside a Gold Rush-era log house and meant for tourists, but the sentiment resonates today. In fact, when it comes to prospecting, you could call 2010 the new 1897 – except that Yukon’s new sourdoughs seek much more than gold.

Resource towns, of course, are fated to rise and fall on the discovery and extraction of their natural riches. Whitehorse, the seat of territorial government and home to three quarters of Yukon’s population, is no different. When mineral prices climb, exploration follows and the population swells – an impressive 12% over the past decade. And recent developments have local hopes and expectations rising even faster.

More than a century after the Klondike Gold Rush brought enterprising souls through town on their way further north, there’s still a bit of a fever up here. This spring, Premier Dennis Fentie proclaimed a new golden era (not to mention a new zinc, lead and silver era). Fentie promptly went on a $1.08-billion spending spree, telling reporters who suggested his budget would bury the territory under further debt, “The 2010-2011 budget is not just a budget for today. It is a budget for tomorrow.” To understand what tomorrow will bring, however, it helps to flash back to 2009.

Roughly a year ago, a Chinese delegation flew to Whitehorse, with some investors trucking down to Selwyn Resources Ltd.’s zinc and lead deposits at Howard’s Pass, home to one of the biggest undeveloped zinc deposits in the world. The rest of the Chinese group headed 300 kilometres northwest of Whitehorse to Western Copper Corp.’s flagship Casino porphyry copper-gold-molybdenum deposit. Yukon government and business have long courted the Asian market, and now it finally paid off: Selwyn inked a deal late last year, which should fund more exploration. (In his 2010 budget speech, Fentie predicted $150 million in revenue for the territory thanks to mineral exploration.)

In 2008, Underworld Resources Ltd. announced that it had struck gold at its White Gold property 95 kilometres south of Dawson City, with exploration continuing through 2009. That led to a much-hyped $135-million wholesale buyout of the company in March by Canada’s largest gold producer, Kinross Gold Corp. And the good news kept coming: two mines – Alexco Resource Corp.’s Bellekeno silver-lead-zinc outfit and (Chinese-owned) Yukon Zinc Corp.’s Wolverine zinc-silver project – expect to start operating this summer.

Government and industry leaders have long claimed that Yukon mining is underdeveloped, so it’s no wonder that all this digging and dealing has led to hyperbole of a more optimistic nature. Now they’re throwing around phrases like “major achievements” and “history in the making.” But a trip down Robert Service Way (named after the great northern poet) through Whitehorse’s dusty downtown is a reminder that history really is always in the making up here.

Whether or not there’s a rush on any given resource, the North nurtures its own brand of counterculture, its colourful past attracting a steady stream of dreamers and fortune-seekers who inevitably reshape legacies. This might just be one of the last places in Canada where neo-hippies attracted by the frontier spirit rub shoulders with mining executives and civil servants (government is the biggest single employer), where outsiders come to literally live outside, and head out on horseback after work to ride through a 360-degree mountain vista. To appropriate the slogan for its own Yukon Brewing Company: It’s a place worth freezing for.

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