Prosperity Goldfields’ employee Adam Mitchell takes a break from the rain in the camp ‘mailbox’. In the Yukon mail comes a lot bigger and usually on an airplane. (Photo: Marlin Olynyk)

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The expansion of mining claims in the Yukon until 2012 (Map: Chris Brackley/Canadian Geographic)

The faint hum of helicopter blades pierces broken fog and falling snow. I’m 1,330 metres up a mountainside in the central Yukon’s Wilson Range, pacing back and forth to mark a landing site as I wait for my ride, which is hovering somewhere in the valley below. Visibility is dropping fast. The pilot’s voice crackles from my handheld radio as he hunts for my location.

“I’m in an avalanche chute,” I reply, sheltering my radio from a burst of wind, “west of zulu … golf … oh … one.” It’s not a great place to be, but the autumn snows aren’t too thick yet and our rendezvous options are extremely limited.

It’s September 2010, and my father and I are 120 kilometres from the nearest dirt road, staking claims in a modern-day gold rush. I’ve spent the past eight hours marking a straight line across rugged topography, blazing axe marks in fir and spruce where my route dips below the treeline, digging through fresh snow to stack rocks and mark shrubs with orange flagging tape in alpine areas above. Every 457 metres, or 1,500 feet, as per regulations, I stop at a GPS waypoint to erect a set of four wooden claim posts, etching my name and the date into metal tags affixed to each. The four posts mark corners of four adjacent 20.9-hectare claims, which give the owners licence to explore the ground for minerals for a full year, free from competition. And this year, there is certainly competition.

My father is an independent prospector who lives in Whitehorse, and we’re revisiting an obscure gold discovery that he made in the early 1990s. His find sat open and unclaimed for the past decade, but a recent inspection of the territorial government’s mineral claim maps revealed fresh claims staked by a competitor over part of the area. Today, while staking what’s left, we see a third company’s helicopter dropping posts near our claims, prepping the ground for its own crews. Just barely, we’ve beat them to it.

The hum of the AStar helicopter gets louder now, growing slowly and then quickly to a roar. But in the fog, there’s no other sign of the machine.

“At treeline …” comes the pilot’s voice again, “… can’t go any higher.”

Above the trees, unbroken snow cover and the enshrouding storm create a dangerous whiteout. But I’m at treeline too, where the last clusters of fir lend some definition to the hillside. I listen, tuning my ears to the chopper. After a pause, I yell into the radio — he’s too far to the west.

The roar drops back down the mountainside, adjusts, then rises again, this time accompanied by the helicopter’s bright landing lights cutting through the blowing snow. I wave, then crouch to brace against the impact of the rotor’s downwash.

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Active, expired, pending and withdrawn mining claims in the Yukon (Map: Chris Brackley/Canadian Geographic)

For many Canadians, the Yukon still conjures images of stampeding prospectors, pans full of gold, poems by Robert Service and other trappings of its first major gold rush. Following the arrival of over two short tons of Yukon placer gold in Seattle in July 1897, tens of thousands of fortune seekers made the journey north to the remote Klondike Valley, and Dawson City became the quintessential boom town: a sprawling mass of false fronts, one-room cabins and wall tents nestled among the hills and permafrost-stunted spruce of the Yukon wilderness. Suddenly, and briefly, it was one of western Canada’s largest cities.

Gone, however, are the days when news of a gold strike elicits this kind of a response from the general public. Following a series of recent gold discoveries in the Yukon, the soft yellow metal is again at the heart of intense international interest in the territory, but today’s rush is a different scene. Most modern stampeders participate from the comfort of their offices and homes by simply buying stock in public companies that are exploring the North. On the front lines, geoscientists and crews of summer fieldworkers, and a few dozen independent prospectors like my father, explore the Yukon bush with both low- and high-tech tools. Behind the scenes, CEOs and financiers navigate tumultuous junior mining markets, attempting to promote their projects and secure funding for further exploration.

“It was a bit of a perfect storm,” says Mike Burke of the modern rush. Recently head of mineral services for the Yukon Geological Survey, Burke is now chief geologist for Golden Predator Corp., a prominent mineral exploration company in the territory. A major hardrock gold discovery south of Dawson — promoted by some as a possible source of the Klondike goldfields — and a rare but potentially rich style of gold mineralization found across the territory underscored the Yukon’s mineral potential just as international gold prices soared to an all-time high. But other factors have channelled interest in this direction, says Burke. The Yukon’s clear land-use policies, its mostly settled First Nations land claims and its stable politics (compared with, say, the Congo) have convinced both local and international investors that it’s a relatively safe place to speculate.

A typical year in the past decade would see fewer than 10,000 claims staked in the Yukon, whereas more than 190,000 claims were registered in 2010 and 2011, peaking at 10.8 percent of the territory’s total surface area under mineral claim — roughly the same percentage as its national and territorial parks. In 2011, more than 100 junior mining companies collectively spent over $300 million exploring the territory for gold and other minerals.

“The discoveries really kicked it off,” says Burke. “Elsewhere, people are looking under cover. Here, we proved there’s still low-hanging fruit.”

If this avalanche of excitement in the Yukon can be traced back to a single person, it would likely be Shawn Ryan. At first glance, Ryan is what you might expect in a modern prospector: a little unkempt and very optimistic. But his enthusiasm is contagious.

For years a mushroom picker based out of a tin shack in the Klondike Valley, Ryan was intrigued by the region’s rich placer gold, pulled as nuggets and dust from alluvial gravels over the past century. Buried somewhere in the surrounding hills, he reasoned, must lay the hardrock source of the Klondike goldfields. So in 1997, with a family on the way, he took to prospecting.

Ryan is now president of Ryan Gold, a publicly traded junior mining company that explores his prospects across the territory, while his wife and business partner, Cathy Wood, tends to their various mineral service companies, their helicopter and, soon, their drill. “He has great ideas,” she says. “Guess who gets to run them.”

Borrowing strategies from junior mining companies, Ryan began soil sampling, a low-impact exploration technique that requires only a few grams of soil, extracted with a soil auger, for geochemical analysis. While many smalltime prospectors might have coasted on moderate, early successes, Ryan reinvested his profits into hiring crews and expanding his operations, finding innovative ways to explore.

“There was no real eureka moment,” says Ryan, who likens each soil sample his crews take to a brush stroke on a painting. A single sample might show a high concentration of gold, or a lack thereof, but only at a single site. With large grids, however, pictures and patterns start to appear, in gold and in other elements, clues to the nature of the underlying bedrock. Using GIS mapping software to process the results, Ryan paints colourful maps to portray his data.

On one property in particular — “White Gold,” near the confluence of the White and Yukon rivers — the soil results were impressive. With each additional survey, Ryan’s picture grew, until brightly coloured zones of anomalous gold in soils spanned an eight-by-four-kilometre area. Through Wood’s promotional efforts, Ryan’s data found their way to geologist Adrian Fleming.

Although he had been in the exploration business for 35 years, in places such as New Guinea, South America, Africa and the Arctic, Fleming had never seen a geochemical dataset as promising as Ryan’s White Gold project — anywhere. “This is just incredible,” he told a colleague. “We’ve got to have this thing!” Fleming had recently started a company, Underworld Resources, in hopes of exploring Australia and New Zealand for minerals, but seeing Ryan’s data, he jumped on the opportunity to come north.

“Underworld Resources was a dream run,” says Fleming when we meet at his office in downtown Vancouver. Just three summer exploration seasons after signing a deal with Ryan and Wood, through sampling, trenching and drilling of the anomaly, the company outlined a resource of over 1.5 million ounces of gold, two dozen times more than the first payload of Klondike gold carried to Seattle in 1897. Again, news of the Klondike spread, this time as speculation that its hardrock source had been found. The discovery caught the attention of the Toronto-based Kinross Gold Corporation, which bought Underworld Resources, and the new deposit, for a cool $137 million.

“It all happened very quickly,” says Fleming. “I doubt I’ll have the good fortune to duplicate that again in my career.”

He’s almost certainly right. The junior mining market is a rarity among industries, in that most of its companies have no product. Like Underworld, a junior company identifies a promising prospect, often buying discoveries directly from independent prospectors like my father or Ryan, then goes to the stock market to raise money. It spends that money exploring the prospect. Nothing comes out the other end, save for a bit of new data on a small patch of the Earth’s crust. As might be expected from the business model, a huge majority of these companies fail.