BCBusiness
Tara Christie, President and CEO, Banyan Gold Corp.; co-founder and president, Every Student, Every Day Society Yukon, is a winner in the Leader category of the 2025 Women of the Year Awards
Tara Christie grew up in mining. Her dad, a geologist, brought the family to the Yukon when she was eight years old. For a while, she was sure her path would lead her to anywhere else. “I was going to be a doctor and get into biomedical engineering—I love science, engineering, biology,” she recalls.
Then, while studying at UBC, she realized the field wasn’t for her. She tried out some other things—chemical engineering, physics, mechanical engineering—before coming full circle. “I fell into geological engineering and came home and told my dad that’s what I wanted to do. He goes, ‘That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard,’” Christie recalls with a laugh. “I think he was worried about the boom-bust of mining— geological cycles can be kind of tough. But I saw it as the perfect job for me.”
Geological engineering, argues Christie, can have both the big, entrepreneurial dreams that come with mining and also the steady, safe day jobs if those don’t pan out: “I could always build foundations [for buildings] or get into highway design; those opportunities were there.”
The entrepreneurial part won out, and Christie served as president and/or director of a handful of mining companies, including Vancouver-based Klondike Gold Corp. Eventually, she became CEO of Banyan Gold Corp., which has employees across the country and its main exploration areas in the Yukon.
Christie, who is based in Vancouver, describes finding one of the company’s main sites, the AurMac Gold Project, by purchasing the alluvial rights (the ownership of new land formed naturally along riverbanks due to sediment carried through the water) years beforehand. “I bought the surface gold—that’s how I knew about it and we set out to acquire it and made the discovery in 2019,” she says. That move propelled the company toward a peak market cap of around $110 million. That has backed off a bit now to around $75 million, but it’s still a big uptick from where it once was. “There was a time when we were a $3-million market cap company,” says Christie. “It’s a pretty interesting story, I think, to have built something that quickly.”
She’s also the co-founder and president of the Victoria Gold Yukon Student Encouragement Society, an independent charity that works to raise awareness and funds to support student success across the Yukon. “Sometimes the thing that most changes a kid’s career is one single caring adult that makes the connection,” Christie says. “For me, that’s been the greatest success. And I’ve seen it over and over again.”
Discover our full list of 21 BCBusiness 2025 Women of the Year award winners here.