industries

The New Yukon Gold Rush

New methods and new technology have opened up the Yukon to gold mining again. Vancouver explorers are forming a new gold rush in the territory.  It’s been a long time since the great Klondike gold rush of 1896, but there’s another stampede of miners to the great white north above B.C. Only these days it’s called an “area play” instead of a gold rush.  

By Tony Wanless /

Yukon gold rush
Hundreds of junior gold explorers are expected to descend on the Yukon this spring.

New methods and new technology have opened up the Yukon to gold mining again. Vancouver explorers are forming a new gold rush in the territory. 

It’s been a long time since the great Klondike gold rush of 1896, but there’s another stampede of miners to the great white north above B.C. Only these days it’s called an “area play” instead of a gold rush.
 
Hundreds of junior gold explorers – many of them based in Vancouver – are expected to descend on the Yukon this spring because of some recent findings. The Howe Street stock sheets are buzzing about the big play.

The hottest territory is an area called the Selwyn Basin, which appears to have a large gold resource similar to Nevada’s Great Basin, producer of about 11 per cent of the world’s annual production of gold, as well as silver and copper.

Whether the Selwyn basin does or does not mimic Nevada has yet to be determined, but many of the companies believe in the Yukon’s potential enough to have drawn investor financing for their explorations. It doesn’t hurt that last March gold giant Kinross Gold Corp. bought Underworld, a company that showed a potential gold resource of one and one-half million ounces in the region. 

 
According to Greg McCoach, founder and president of The Mining Spectator, $160 million was spent on exploration in the Yukon in 2010 and $320 million in exploration work is planned for this summer 2011.
 
You can get a flavour of the enthusiasm among explorers from investor presentations offered by a couple of companies involved. Aben Resources wants to be the next Underworld and so does YES Exploration, a company that has physically staked many hundreds of claims around an area called the Carmack caldera. 
 
Obviously, Vancouver has seen many gold (and other metal) rushes come through town over the past century, and not all of them have panned out. After all, promoters always need something to promote. 
 
But the fever around this Yukon play seems larger than usual, and so must be taken more seriously. 
 
Of course, all of these are still in the early exploration stage and may not result in production for years. 
 
At this point, you definitely place your bets and take your changes.