In early July, Yukon and Alaskan biologists were waiting on a small miracle: the right conditions to summon an apocalyptic storm of mosquitoes. The biting insects, in turn, would drive tens of thousands of caribou into a massive herd, essential to making them countable from the sky.

The phenomenon occurs every July, but photographing it from above to obtain a “photo census,” or population count, is a different story, Mike Suitor, a Whitehorse-based migratory caribou biologist with the Government of Yukon, says.

Suitor, who has been advising on Porcupine caribou herd management since 2012, says witnessing the migration from a bird’s-eye view is difficult to put into words.

“It’s like looking down at an anthill,” Suitor says.

The spectacle is hard to look away from, but biologists have little time for awe. Flying in fixed-wing planes outfitted with digital cameras, they must capture clear, high-resolution images of the herd. Computer software stitches the images together so biologists can manually categorize every individual with a single dot. The software then sums up the dots and determines the population count.

It is an undertaking that hasn’t succeeded since 2017, when researchers estimated the herd at 218,000 animals — the largest population recorded since monitoring began in the 1970s.

Since then, climate change has further complicated the task. Shifting winds scatter herds into the mountains, where they’re exceedingly difficult to photograph, while smoke from increasingly frequent wildfires obscures the horizon. Some years, biologists can’t even get off the ground, let alone get the shot.

This year, the urgency was especially high. After seven years without an accurate population estimate, the Porcupine herd — one of the world’s last healthy migratory caribou populations — needed to be counted.

The herd’s calving grounds in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are currently at the centre of a decades-long fight over oil and gas development. Gwich’in communities on both sides of the border have warned industrial activity in the refuge will destroy the caribou. Despite this, Alaska’s state development agency is preparing to conduct 3D seismic testing there for the first time.

“We know how critical [the photo census] is to communities right now,” Suitor says.

With that in mind, biologists doubled the frequency of GPS signals from more than 110 radio-collared caribou — the small sample of the herd researchers collar to study the larger herd — and the Alaska team began flying daily patrols. Their persistence paid off.

On July 10, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game announced that, thanks to a heat wave which fuelled the right conditions for mosquitoes to swarm and drive the caribou together, they had successfully photographed the Porcupine herd.

Analyzing the images will take months, but Suitor says the achievement is a relief. Many signs suggest the herd is in decline — a disappointment, but not unexpected.

A recent study that analyzed DNA from caribou fossils dating back 21,000 years projected North American caribou populations could see average declines of 84 per cent by 2100, if the planet warms by two to three degrees Celsius. Should greenhouse gas emissions — created by the burning of fossil fuels — remain high, the Porcupine herd’s geographical range could shrink by 71 per cent.

It’s a trend communities on the frontlines of global warming have noticed. The Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation of Old Crow, Yukon, live as cyclically as the Porcupine caribou herd they depend on — and they are just as sensitive to the changing seasons, deputy chief Harold Frost Jr. says. Over the past 20 years, the Vuntut Gwitchin have been living with the daily consequences of what Frost Jr. calls “drastic changes” in the climate.

While most large migratory caribou herds in North America — including many in the Arctic — have declined due to pressures from roads and resource extraction, the Porcupine herd has remained relatively undisturbed by these threats. As a result, its numbers have stayed stable — and even grown. After falling to a low of 123,000 animals in 2001, the herd rebounded to a record high in 2017.

Recently, however, there have been troubling signs. Reproductive rates among three-year-old females are dropping — often an early indicator that a herd is under stress — and fewer calves are surviving. Even more concerning is data from the 110 radio-collared caribou, most of them females. When a collar stops moving, biologists know the animal has died. Over the past year, only about 80 per cent of adult cows survived.

“When you get below 86 per cent, you’re almost guaranteed you’re losing caribou within the herd,” Suitor says. “Climate change is a very significant factor. We hear it from the communities. We see it in the caribou and in their movements. And we’re seeing massive changes in some of these big migratory pathways.”

The question for the Porcupine caribou herd now is: how steep will declines be?

It’s not all bad news: Porcupine caribou herd represents a rare management success, biologist says

Every year, the Porcupine caribou herd makes the longest land migration on earth, traversing more than 4,000 kilometres across tundra, mountains and rivers in the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Alaska to reach its calving grounds in Ivvavik National Park in northern Yukon and Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Ivvavik, in Inuvialuktun, translates to “a place for giving birth, a nursery,” while the Gwich’in people call the Arctic Refuge Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit — the sacred place where life begins.

The Porcupine herd is unique for two reasons, Suitor explains. First, much of its range remains largely intact, spared from heavy development, with a few exceptions.

Second, the Porcupine herd was the first in North America to be formally managed through collaboration. The Porcupine Caribou Management Agreement was signed by the federal and territorial governments of Canada, Yukon and the Northwest Territories, and First Nations communities in 1985, followed by a 1987 treaty between Canada and the U.S. The herd is co-managed by Canada and the U.S., in collaboration with Indigenous communities.

In this way, the Porcupine caribou herd represents a rare success, uniquely positioned to withstand the challenges ahead.

“You need to have these strong partnerships to realize change, and I think the Porcupine caribou story has been a great narrative around that,” Suitor says, crediting decades of cross-border collaboration. 

Those partnerships are also facing threats as Indigenous and environmental organizations are gearing up for the next phase of the struggle against the U.S. administration’s agenda of drilling in the herd’s calving grounds in the Arctic Refuge.

Laurence Fox, campaigns coordinator at the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s Yukon chapter, based in Whitehorse, told The Narwhal the next phase of advocacy should be guided by Gwich’in communities, who’ve lived alongside the caribou for thousands of years.

Fox points out how the U.S. administration is employing the rhetoric of “a national energy emergency” to move resource extraction projects forward with greater speed, which, they added, is not dissimilar to Canada’s push to pass Bill C-5.

Both the U.S. and Canadian governments are attempting to speed up timelines on approving projects and moving major infrastructure and development plans forward.

While protecting the Arctic Refuge from oil and gas development has been a decades-long struggle, Fox says “the rules of the game” have changed, especially under the current U.S. administration’s leadership. But no matter the gravity of what Indigenous and environmental organizations are up against, Fox says, it’s critical to move forward slowly and methodically.

With this same principle in mind, Canada’s Porcupine Caribou Management Board has worked with Indigenous communities, governments, scientists and policymakers to safeguard the herd’s long-term health.

“We’re always thinking ahead,” says Joe Tetlichi, chair of the Porcupine Caribou Management Board and a member of the Tetlit Gwich’in who lives in Whitehorse. “And the reason we’re thinking ahead is because back in the early 2000s, we watched the George River herd, the Bathurst and the Bluenose East and West all decline.”

The disappearance of other barren-ground caribou herds in North America has been startling. For example, the Bathurst herd in the Northwest Territories plummeted from 470,000 in the mid-1980s to 6,240 today.

These sharp declines motivated Tetlichi and the board, in close collaboration with Indigenous communities, to create a harvest management plan that sets clear rules that would limit the number or sex of caribou individuals are allowed to hunt if the population falls below certain thresholds. The plan includes a chart indicating herd status and hunting requirements with levels ranging from green (no restrictions for Indigenous communities, and some for other licensed hunters) to yellow, orange and red (more limited hunting to no hunting at all).

“We know we have no control over climate change, but we know we have control over harvesting,” Tetlichi says.

Since the plan’s creation in 2010, the Porcupine caribou herd has consistently remained in the green zone. As a result, Tetlichi notes, the plan has never been put to the test.

“If the herd ever goes down to 45,000 it’s not going to be easy to put our management plan at the plate,” he says, referring to the food security hardships the community would face and the uncertainty of compliance. Despite having a management strategy in place for the situation, the results would not be ideal. “It’s going to be tough, really tough.”

Today, based on the photo census from 2017 and other indicators, the herd is considered stable. Licensed hunters can harvest up to two bulls, while Indigenous hunters face no limits. Still, Tetlichi stresses, the plan “covers bases” for the day when the population inevitably declines.

“We’re taking the bull by the horns and moving forward for the sake of the well-being of the caribou,” he says.

Mosquitoes and warble flies make caribou ‘go nuts’

Climatic shifts in the Porcupine caribou herd’s range are complex and interconnected, Suitor says. Warmer year-round temperatures are driving more frequent wildfires and increased vegetation growth. Heavy late-winter snowfalls can delay the herd’s migration to its calving grounds. Altogether, the landscape is changing rapidly, forcing the Porcupine caribou to adapt.

“Deciduous vegetation [on the tundra] is growing taller and bushier, which isn’t ideal for migratory caribou that prefer lichen,” Suitor says. That has spinoff effects for attracting moose, which in turn increases wolf predation — and so on.

Biologists are also asking: could increasing temperatures lead to increased insect harassment of the herd? Suitor’s team has a paper under peer review showing mosquito populations are peaking earlier. If this trend overlaps with calving and post-calving in June — when calves are still small and vulnerable — it could lead to increased mortality.

And then there’s the worry about warble flies, bumblebee-sized insects that can travel hundreds of kilometres in search of caribou, buzzing and dive-bombing the herds. The flies lay their eggs in caribou’s fur on the animals’ legs and hindquarters. When the eggs hatch, the larvae crawl onto the caribou’s back, and burrow into their skin for the winter. In spring, they emerge as adult larvae, fall to the ground and the cycle begins again.

“One warble fly can show up in a big herd of caribou and the caribou go nuts,” Suitor says. “They hate them. They can expend a ton of energy and during some parts of the summer they will choose habitats without food to try and get away from them, which can affect things like calving rates the next year.”

Suitor and his team have been analyzing 70,000 video clips from collar-mounted cameras. The early results suggest warble fly populations, like mosquitoes, are also peaking earlier in the season — adding another layer of pressure.

In the Northwest Territories, Indigenous hide tanners have also noticed an increase in hides affected by warble flies, who leave pockmark holes.

Christine Creyke, a hide tanner and member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and Tahltan First Nation who lives in Old Crow, told The Narwhal in May she’s worried about the growing impacts of climate change on the herd.

“When I’m working on my hides, I’m always thinking about the environmental changes happening to the caribou and how it’s affecting my work with traditional practice,” Creyke said.

Changes to caribou migration mean big changes for the people who depend on them

The Vuntut Gwitchin of Old Crow are already suffering the consequences of the collapse of another vital mainstay: Chinook salmon. Vuntut Gwitchin deputy chief Frost Jr. says the salmon have disappeared from the Porcupine River, a tributary of the Yukon River, forcing the community to adapt by relying more heavily on freshwater fish.

In 2024, Canada and Alaska signed an agreement to establish a seven-year moratorium on Chinook salmon fishing in the Yukon River system. 

The loss of salmon intensifies concerns about climate and human-related pressures on the Porcupine caribou herd. 

Over the past 12 to 15 years, Frost Jr. explains, the community has observed major shifts in the herd’s migratory routes to their traditional wintering grounds south of Old Crow — changes that directly affect the Vuntut Gwitchin’s ability to access and harvest caribou. Instead of remaining in the Porcupine basin for the winter, he says, the herd is travelling farther north or east of Old Crow. During the rut, or mating season, in October, they are returning later than they did previously and staying for shorter periods.

“[The caribou] are only here for two to three days and the men have to be ready to go hunt on the mountain,” Frost Jr. says. “Then [hunters] have to travel longer distances in the winter to wherever [the herd is] wintering at — that’s been a big change.”

The changes people are witnessing are widespread, including record-breaking summer temperatures that fuel wildfires. In August 2023, residents of Old Crow — a fly-in community — were evacuated due to wildfire threats, including one that burned only kilometres away.

The Porcupine River is freezing later in the fall and breaking up earlier in the spring, which disrupts the timing of the herd’s migration, Frost Jr. says. The community has also experienced more frequent rain-on-snow events in October and November, creating icy conditions.

“It causes grief for the caribou because it’s harder for them to dig up their food under the snow,” Frost Jr. says.

For the deputy chief there is no doubt: climate change is already inflicting grave consequences on the land, the animals and the community. The Vuntut Gwitchin continue to rely on traditional hunting and gathering practices — caribou, moose, muskrat, fish and berries — because store-bought food in their subarctic community is prohibitively expensive for many families. Their food security and survival depends on the longevity of vadzaih, the Gwich’in word for caribou.

“We’re living here where [climate change] is affecting us — and the caribou — in real time,” Frost Jr. says, “not only physically, but mentally and emotionally.”

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Succulent scents of caribou, moose, muskrat and beaver — boiled, roasted and fried — waft from the kitchen. Young children chase one another around the community centre, clutching bags of dried caribou, strings of meat stuck in their teeth. The stage is set with pink iridescent streamers and the band’s fiddles, guitars and drums, ready for a night of music and jigging. 

Adults and youth alike give their names to a coordinator with a notebook, signing up to join in the games, including caribou head skinning, log sawing and muskrat-calling. Outside, there’s still ice on the Porcupine River — break-up is late this year, locals say. There’s no caribou in sight, but people know they’re close by. The spring migration is underway.

Several hundred people from across the North have gathered here in Old Crow, Yukon, a subarctic community at the 67th parallel, to celebrate Vadzaih Choo Drin, or “Big Caribou Days.” It’s the 25th anniversary of the event celebrating the seasonal return of the Porcupine caribou herd, one of the largest barren-ground caribou populations in North America, as they migrate toward their summer calving grounds in Ivvavik National Park and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. The Gwich’in refer to the calving grounds as Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit — the sacred place where life begins.

“My grandparents, they taught me about caribou. They take me out to the caribou when they’re coming, they show me the different age groups and tell me the names of these caribou,” Randall Tetlichi, a Vuntut Gwitchin Elder, says at the opening ceremony in late May.

Before he was allowed to hunt, Tetlichi had to learn how to distinguish between the big bulls, young bulls, one- and two-year-olds, pregnant females and the “old females with dried-up udders” who grunted up the hill behind the others. The last group was the one to harvest, he says. This knowledge of caribou traditionally guided the way the Vuntut Gwitchin managed the herd that migrates across the Porcupine River every spring and fall.

“Our job is to teach the young people,” Tetlichi says, offering a song and prayer for vadzaih, Gwich’in for “caribou,” welcoming them back home to Old Crow.

“I wanted the kids to have that taste of what our grandparents worked so hard for in Crow Flats,” Teresa Frost, an event coordinator with the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation (VGFN), says to the crowd, as volunteers hand out bags of caribou dry meat and bone grease.

Old Crow Flats, located north of Old Crow, is a traditional place where people camp, trap muskrat and hunt for what remains their most important food source — caribou.

The fate of the Porcupine caribou herd — considered one of North America’s last remaining healthy herds at an estimated 218,000 animals — is bound up with the fate of the Gwich’in people. The story of the Gwich’in people and caribou is a story about a multi-generational struggle to advocate for the permanent protection of the Porcupine caribou herd’s calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 

But the fate of the caribou — and the Gwich’in way of life — is now intricately tangled up in U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent moves to expand oil and gas activity in the refuge. The refuge has long been an ideological battleground between those in favour of drilling and those against it, but with Trump at the helm, the stakes have never been higher, pitting the Gwich’in people against what they’re calling an unprecedented threat as they work together to protect the caribou they depend on.

Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ poses immediate threats to the Porcupine caribou herd

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a richly biodiverse ecosystem covering over 78,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of New Brunswick or South Carolina. It stretches from the Brooks Range mountains to the Arctic Ocean coastline, teeming with migratory birds, grizzly and polar bears, wolves and pregnant caribou who gather together to drop gangly calves onto the tundra. For the Gwich’in, it’s sacred territory. Here, there are stories told about the Gwich’in trading half of their heart with the heart of the caribou.

For decades, U.S. governments have been pushing for exploration and development within the refuge, including Ronald Reagan in 1987 and George W. Bush in the 2000s, with the goal to open up oil and gas development in an area known as “the 1002,” a 6,000-square-kilometre tract of land within the refuge. The United States Geological Survey estimates there could be somewhere between 4.3 to 11.8 billion barrels of oil in the area, but no one can say for sure — while a 2D seismic test was done in the 1980s, today’s more advanced technique of 3D seismic testing has never been done.

For decades, the Gwich’in have been organizing to prevent exploration — agreeing with Western science that finds drilling in the calving grounds would likely cause calf mortality and devastating declines in the herd’s size and resilience, which refers to its ability to cope with changes in the environment.

In 1988, Gwich’in Elders and leaders from communities in Alaska and Canada gathered in Arctic Village, Alaska, to found the Gwich’in Steering Committee with the goal of collectively lobbying U.S. policymakers for the permanent protection of the refuge. For the Gwich’in it was a pivotal moment, having been divided by the border as part of colonization, to unite and strengthen their nation’s collective voice.

For years, Gwich’in advocacy worked to keep oil and gas out, while lobbying for the permanent protection of the refuge. In 2015, President Barack Obama recommended Congress designate over 49,000 square kilometres of the refuge as “wilderness,” but it failed to pass. In 2017, the political pendulum swung back with President Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which mandated two oil and gas lease sales in the refuge to offset corporate tax cuts. Despite being slapped with a lawsuit by the Gwich’in Steering Committee in 2020, Trump held the first lease sale on Jan. 6, 2021, offering 22 tracts of land, equal to five percent of the refuge. The Gwich’in people and their allies urged oil and gas companies and banks not to bid and the sale didn’t go as planned. Only three companies bid, generating US$14.4 million — a long shot from Trump’s estimated US$1.8 billion.

From 2021 to 2024, former president Joe Biden’s administration sought to undo what Trump had done in the refuge, including cancelling all of the leases, citing insufficient analysis under the national Environmental Policy Act. Despite this, Biden was still legally bound to the second lease sale laid out in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In December 2024, no companies bid. Shortly after, the state of Alaska sued the Biden administration over the cancelled leases — and in March, a judge ruled in its favour.

At Caribou Days in Old Crow in May, the games gave way to more sobering discussions about what Trump’s re-election in January — and his executive order to “drill, baby, drill” and reinstate the terminated leases — could mean for the future of the refuge.

“Over the next few years, more than ever, we’re going to need to come together,” Harold Frost Jr., deputy chief for the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, told the crowd, warning the community about what would come to be signed into law on July 4 — Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

The new budget bill — which critics argue is an extension of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — doubles the number of lease sales in the refuge, stipulating that four additional sales, no less than 1,600 square kilometres per lease, must take place within the next 10 years. The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society Yukon told the Narwhal that Trump could be attempting to create market stability for oil and gas companies over a longer duration of time. Even if a democratic government were elected, it could be exceedingly difficult to change the new bill, as Biden failed to do with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Today, the Alaska industrial development agency, holding the reinstated seven leases in the refuge, is on the brink of undertaking 3D seismic testing for the first time in history — one step closer to drilling in the calving grounds.

“We are no longer dealing with a familiar threat,” Frost Jr. told the Narwhal, after the signing of the new bill. “We are facing an administration willing to bypass reason, disregarding science and economic logic, to achieve its goal of drilling. We must organize. We must amplify our voices. We must protect this sacred place with everything we have.”

Gwich’in relationship with caribou begins ‘in our mother’s womb’

“The first time I tasted caribou was when I was born,” Tetlichi says over the sound of fiddle music and boots stomping along to the beat. He was born in Johnson Creek, 140 kilometres south of Old Crow, but moved north when he was eight years old.

When Tetlichi was 13 years old, he remembers camping in Old Crow Flats with his grandparents and witnessing the spring migration of the Porcupine caribou herd. He waited with a rifle and watched the caribou draw closer. He spotted an “older, dry cow that didn’t have a calf in her” and his grandfather gave him the okay. As Tetlichi skinned the caribou and cut the ribcage, his grandfather brought over a cup and filled it with the animal’s blood. He handed it to his grandson after he’d finished skinning the caribou. “Drink this,” his grandfather said.

“He said, ‘Now you can call yourself a hunter because you drank that blood and the caribou is part of you. The caribou is in your body and now you’re going to understand the movement of the caribou,’” Tetlichi says. “I felt happy and proud.”

The Gwich’in people have been intertwined with the Porcupine caribou herd for thousands of years. There is archeological evidence of their close bond at different sites across northern Yukon and Alaska, including Van Tat Gwich’in Teechik, a hunting camp located 60 kilometres east of Old Crow where archeologists discovered tools made from stone, caribou antler and bone, some estimated to be 3,000 years old.

When he was growing up, Tetlichi’s Elders told him stories about “caribou fences,” large structures built from spruce logs that measured kilometres wide at the mouth and funnelled caribou into a corral where they’d be snared and speared.

“The whole community was part of it,” Tetlichi says, referring to building the fences — carrying trees from places that were sometimes kilometres away — and also the hunt.

With the onset of colonization and introduction of firearms, people stopped using caribou fences. But there are 46 known caribou fence sites in Alaska and northern Yukon with seven located in Vuntut National Park to the north of Old Crow.

Oil exploration to the south and north of Old Crow began in the 1950s. In the late ‘60s and through the ‘70s, Tetlichi and other men from Old Crow travelled north to work at drilling sites in the Mackenzie Delta. “We didn’t question it,” he says. But after a decade, he recognized the negative impacts of oil and gas on the land and people.

“I seen it, I felt it,” he says. “They’re not good.”

When the Gwich’in Steering Committee formed in 1988 to lobby against oil and gas in the Porcupine herd’s calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Tetlichi was chosen to travel to Washington, D.C., on one of the first delegations. He remembers sleeping on a church basement floor and experiencing culture shock from the city’s traffic and noise. He was afraid, but Tetlichi knew he was there to talk to people about what caribou meant to the Gwich’in people and what would be lost if they opened up the refuge for oil and gas exploitation — so that’s what he did. He shared stories with politicians and citizens alike. Four decades later, he hasn’t stopped.

Lorraine Netro, a Vuntut Gwitchin Elder who was born and raised in Old Crow and today lives in Whitehorse, agrees about the importance of speaking out. “The Elders in our nation asked us to educate the outside world about why we need to protect that sacred place where life begins,” she says. Disturbance to the calving grounds will “destroy the caribou and destroy us as a people,” she adds.

Netro says the sacred connection with caribou begins “in our mother’s womb, when we taste caribou.” 

She remembers watching her mother hunt and skin caribou in Crow Flats, and the feeling of happiness, knowing they’d have food to eat and new moccasins and clothing to wear. No part of the animal was wasted. Her grandmother made sinew from the tendons.

In the late ‘90s, Netro joined the advocacy efforts to protect the Porcupine caribou herd. In 1999, she followed in Tetlichi and other Gwich’in leaders’ footsteps, participating in a lobby delegation to Washington. It opened her eyes to the power of storytelling — even when they had only “five, ten minutes” to speak with U.S. politicians — to change people’s minds and shape policy and decision-making. The Gwich’in have “touched many, many people”, she says.

“It’s part of our responsibility. It’s about our future generations — seven generations and beyond — so that our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren can be blessed to have that spiritual and sacred connection to the caribou.”

Gwich’in members and Elders have been travelling to the U.S. to advocate for caribou for decades

Kris Statnyk, a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, remembers watching a video of his own grandmother, Dr. Reverend Ellen Bruce, speaking at the Gwich’in gathering in Arctic Village in 1988, and family members travelling to Washington to lobby politicians. Even as a child, advocating for caribou felt like a kind of rite of passage.

Today, Statnyk is an Indigenous Rights lawyer based in Gitxsan Territory in northern B.C. and the co-chair of the Gwich’in Council International, along with the head of delegation for the Arctic Council. He continues to work closely with Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and a large part of that, Statnyk says, is continuing his ancestors’ legacy of advocacy for the Porcupine caribou herd.

Despite more than a hundred years of colonization, he says, caribou continues to be a mainstay of Gwich’in life, culture and food security. While the majority of other barren-ground caribou herds in Canada are threatened — their habitat fragmented by industrial development — Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation has worked to protect the Porcupine herd in Canada by negotiating their land claim agreement in 1993 and creating Vuntut National Park in 1995, protecting key habitat in Yukon where no industrial development can occur.

But across the border, the calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — and influence over U.S. politicians — has always remained something the Vuntut Gwitchin can’t directly control, Statnyk says, and now, perhaps, more than ever.

He travelled to Old Crow in May to speak at Caribou Days and take part in the festivities and discussions on the urgency of the times.

“Seismic activity could be happening in [the refuge] within a year — that’s just the reality,” Statnyk says. “We haven’t really come close to that before. We can try to slow down the regulatory process and dissuade companies and banks from supporting projects in that area, but it’s difficult to prevent this U.S. administration from greenlighting things they want.”

Oil and gas development in the sacred calving grounds in the refuge is “a clear violation” of the Gwich’in people’s rights to self-determination as expressed in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Statnyk says. (While the U.S. has officially endorsed the declaration since 2010, it is not legally binding. Today, Indigenous groups are calling on Trump to operationalize the declaration.) In addition, the U.S. is failing to to implement its responsibility to consult with Gwich’in and other Indigenous communities in Canada, as stipulated in the Canada-United States agreement on Porcupine caribou conservation, a treaty signed in 1987.

“On the Canadian side, we’ve never, ever been invited directly [by the U.S. government] to participate in any of these regulatory processes,” Statnyk says. “It’s always been on our own initiative where we’re asserting and showing up.”

Despite the political situation they’re up against, Statnyk is heartened by the legacy of relationships that have been built over the past decades with people, politicians and communities in the Lower 48 and across Canada.

“We’re always told [by our Elders] to go out and make friends, to do this in a ‘good way,’ ” Statnyk says. “It means a lot of things for how we conduct ourselves, even when people are making decisions as if we don’t exist, or don’t matter.”

The long game has always been the permanent protection of the coastal plain, which requires congressional legislation, but it’s a goal the Gwich’in remain committed to.

‘I’m up here hauling all my water to soak my hides. We don’t need all of this gas’

Christine Creyke, a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and Tahltan First Nation, carefully hangs her caribou and moose hides on a spruce beam outside her home in Old Crow, lovingly inspecting each one. Days, weeks, months of physical work went into processing these hides: fleshing, scraping, wringing, softening and smoking.

When she’s working on hides, Creyke feels a strong sense of identity and community.

“There are conversations that happen around hide work in terms of culture and what it means to be Indigenous,” Creyke says. “These relationships, both the ones made between people working on hides together and the ones made between people and caribou through the process of hide tanning are important for healthy communities.”

Every hide is unique, she explains, pointing to a cream-coloured caribou hide pricked with small holes. The holes look like stars scattered against the night sky. They’re scars from warble flies, parasitic flies that lay their eggs in the legs of caribou. The hatched larvae migrate onto the caribou’s back where they feed off the animal, causing major energy losses.

“I want to sew something special with this,” Creyke says, handling the scarred hide with affection. “I always try to think about the animal and honour what they endured.”

As a result of climate change and warming temperatures, warble flies may be developing earlier in the summer, which could harm caribou — particularly during the calving season. Creyke is worried how cumulative pressures from oil and gas, along with climate change, could impact herd resiliency.

In 2024, Creyke, who works as the lands manager with Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, was appointed on behalf of Old Crow to serve on the Gwich’in Steering Committee and advocate for the Porcupine caribou herd. It’s been a huge learning curve to navigate U.S. politics and the environmental assessment process in Alaska, Creyke says, but it’s one she’s embracing. In addition, Creyke was recently appointed to the Gwich’in Council International.

“I feel immense responsibility,” she says, acknowledging the support and inspiration of her mentors, including Netro and Norma Kassi. Kassi, a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation who was raised in Old Crow and today lives in Whitehorse, served as an MLA for Old Crow from 1985 to 1992 and has travelled around the world advocating for the Porcupine caribou herd.

Creyke points out the disparities that exist between northern and southern communities, particularly when it comes to drilling for oil and gas in the sacred calving grounds on the Alaska side, as well as their wintering grounds in the Eagle Plains Basin, south of Old Crow, on the Canadian side.

Chance Oil and Gas, a Canadian-owned company, currently holds eight oil and gas leases in the Eagle Plains Basin on 4,000 square kilometres of the Porcupine herd’s wintering grounds.

“I see these huge mega oil and gas projects as part of a way to fuel a world that is so far removed from ours,” Creyke says. “There’s just so much energy consumption in the world. I’m up here hauling all my water to soak my hides. We don’t need all of this gas. What I need is for my hides to be soft, and my caribou herds to be healthy, and my freezer to be full.”

She points to the startling declines of other barren-ground caribou herds in Canada, including the Bathurst herd in the Northwest Territories, which plummeted from 470,000 in the mid-1980s to 6,240 today. There is no harvest of the Bathurst herd allowed in the Northwest Territories, while a limited hunt is permitted in Nunavut.

“I can’t imagine what that means for people who relied on their herd for everything — food, clothing, culture and way of being,” Creyke acknowledges. “When I think about my kids and them wanting to work on hides in the future, … I have to do this advocacy work now.”

‘Trump’s not going to stop’: Gwich’in people organize to fight back for the caribou

Across the U.S.-Canadian border in the Gwich’in community of Arctic Village, Alaska, Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, was devastated to receive the news of the “Big Beautiful Bill” mandating four new lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“Hearing it was four more lease [sales] has our people on edge. Trump’s not going to stop,” Moreland says. “But that’s just going to make us work even harder to advocate for our land. With everything going on in this world, we need to stand together more than ever to protect the Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit — the sacred place where life begins.”

Recently, the steering committee announced an emergency Gwich’in gathering in Arctic Village on Sept. 4 for Gwich’in communities to come together to explore options — raising awareness, lobbying companies and financial institutions or taking legal action — for how to move forward as a unified front. Moreland says that’s critical to hear from Elders.

“It’s going to be like our first Gwich’in gathering in Arctic Village in 1988 when our Elders came together from Canada and Alaska, to come in solidarity for the opposition of oil and gas,” she says. “Our Elders need to guide us, right now more than ever, because they know what’s at stake.”

Gwich’in communities are already feeling the loss of another vital food source, Moreland points out. Much like caribou, salmon have sustained Gwich’in and other Indigenous communities for millennia. But the collapse of different salmon populations in the North has resulted in empty freezers and pantries. Many communities haven’t been able to fish for the past five years. In 2024, a transboundary seven-year moratorium on fishing salmon in the Yukon River was implemented.

Eighty percent of the Gwich’in diet comes from the land, Moreland says, with caribou being the most important source of meat. They can’t afford to lose another critical food source.

“The caribou are not just a species to us. They’re essential to our food security and our survival. It’s not a metaphor. It’s lived reality.”

According to the Big Beautiful Bill, the first oil and gas lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge must occur before July 4, 2026, with the others to follow over the next nine years.

Despite the gravity of what this means for the fate of the Porcupine caribou herd — and the Gwich’in people — Moreland says their resolve to continue fighting for the protection of the calving grounds is stronger.

“No amount of money can justify what is taking place, and we will continue to stand up to anyone who seeks to contribute to this destruction of our sacred lands,” Moreland says. “We have a lot of people on our side. We will not stop fighting. We’re Gwich’in Strong.”

Updated on Aug. 20, 2025, at 7:55 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct a statement suggesting seismic testing has never been done in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In fact, a 2D seismic test was done in the 1980s, but the more advanced technique of 3D seismic testing has not been done.

Updated on Aug. 25, 2025, at 6:06 a.m. PT: This article has been updated to correct the name of Arctic Village, Alaska.

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It’s 3:30 a.m. and a headlamp flickers like a firefly in the distance, growing in size. The voice of a volunteer cries out: “A team is coming!”

I can hear a chorus of dogs panting, of harness lines jangling. Then, from out of the darkness, a musher and team of twelve dogs emerge like ghostly figures. The musher steps on his sled’s drag mat, slowing the team, and stomps a “snow hook,” a fish-hook-like anchor that acts like a car brake, into the snow.

“Welcome to Quiet Lake!” a race official says, jotting down the team’s time of arrival into the remote checkpoint in southern Yukon.

I’m here in early February, bundled in a parka, snow pants and beaver-fur mitts, working as a race reporter for the Yukon Quest, an annual sled-dog race that has been running for 40 years. The race, a significant cultural event in the North, was created in 1984 to celebrate the history of sled dogs as a means of transportation in the Yukon and Alaska.

It’s so cold at Quiet Lake that you can hear it. As the musher tosses chunks of bacon to his dogs, the snow doesn’t crunch — it squeaks under the weight of his bulbous Arctic military boots, which are insulated with felt and thick rubber. Originally designed to be worn by American soldiers in the extreme cold, the boots are ubiquitous amongst mushers for their ability to keep your feet warm, even if you plunge into water. 

It’s -40 C, the kind of cold that can damage exposed skin in a matter of minutes. Even the dogs — Alaskan huskies, a mix of husky and hound, bred to pull — are wearing down-filled jackets.

The deep, biting cold has come as something of a relief to mushers, however. Only a week ago, temperatures in southern Yukon hovered above 0 C. Normal temperatures in January in Whitehorse are a high of -14 C and a low of -22 C.

Anne Tayler, board president of the Yukon Quest, worried it would be a repeat of last year when a week of warm weather — 5 to 10 C — forced organizers to reroute the race in two places. The decision came as meltwater led to unsafe conditions, including nearly two kilometres of open water around McCabe Creek on the Yukon River. Mushers are no strangers to navigating their teams through extreme conditions like glare ice, blizzards, whiteouts and overflow (water that pools up over ice that’s been pushed down by the weight of snow), Tayler says, but when it comes to open water, “it’s just not an option.” In 2024, officials shortened the race by 241 kilometres. 

For four decades, the historic Quest followed a 1,600-kilometre trail on the frozen Yukon River, a “deep, fast river,” Tayler says, that flows like a vein between Whitehorse, Yukon, and Fairbanks, Alaska. The cross-border race was considered one of the most gruelling sled dog races in the world for its technicality and the long distances between the checkpoints where mushers can rest and resupply. At its peak in the mid-2000s, the Quest once attracted a roster of 30 mushers and offered a prize of up to $35,000 to the winner. But a 1,600-kilometre race hasn’t happened since 2020. Disagreements between the Canadian and American organizers over mandatory rest times for dogs (the Canadians were in favour of increasing rest times) caused a fissure that resulted in both countries organizing separate, shorter races.

And now climate change is wreaking havoc, forcing long-distance sled dog races to “pivot,” Tayler says. In recent years, sudden warming events — dramatic swings in temperature in a matter of hours or days — are becoming far more frequent, creating major risks and uncertainty for mushers in the Yukon and across North America. 

Last year, organizers made the tough call to abandon the historic route on the Yukon River. They began working with First Nations communities in southern Yukon, including Teslin Tlingit Council and the Ross River Dena Council, to map out a new 720-kilometre trail through their traditional territories that would avoid rivers — and the risk of open water — altogether. The longterm goal, Tayler says, is to find an overland route from Teslin to Dawson City that limits water crossings to small river systems only.

In addition to climate-related challenges, other obstacles, including the rising costs of feeding dozens of dogs, are causing many mushers to drop out altogether. Sixteen teams signed up for the race this year, nearly 50 per cent fewer than in previous decades. But the mushers who’ve come are here for the love of the dogs and the thrill of travelling for four to five days through the Yukon wilderness in the winter. And they’re here despite the challenges — and the uncertain future — they’re up against.

‘Extremes are getting more frequent and harder’ for mushers

Ideal weather for a musher is very different than ideal weather for a dog, but “the dog is what counts,” Sebastian Schnuelle, a retired musher based in Whitehorse, says. Schnuelle won the Yukon Quest in 2009 and has placed second in the Iditarod, an annual 1,600-kilometre race that travels between Anchorage and Nome, Alaska.

“Physiologically, dogs do best at -20 C,” Schnuelle says. “That’s when they don’t overheat and they’re the happiest. It’s their optimum operating temperature.”

Temperature dictates many things in a musher’s world, including what kind of food they give their dogs, who get hydrating foods like fish on warm days and high-fat foods, like pork belly and lamb on cold days. It also determines trail conditions, which in turn helps them decide which type of interchangeable plastic runners they choose for their sleds. (Traditionally, sled runners were made of wood, but plastic versions were introduced in the 1980s.)

Mushers have learned to expect all forms of weather-related risks, Schnuelle says, especially over the course of long-distance races.

“Variable weather has always been a factor,” he says.

Schnuelle recalls hunkering down with his dogs to wait out monstrous storms, travelling through “ungodly overflow” at -55 C, or navigating “jumble ice” — rough ice that forms on the surface of a river due to warming temperatures and the force of the water flowing beneath.

Warming events have been occurring in the Yukon since the Quest’s inception in 1984, Schnuelle says. No one can forget the tragic loss of Bruce Johnson, a Yukon musher who was travelling with his team across Atlin Lake on Nov. 19, 1993, when they hit a weak spot on the ice and plunged to their deaths. It had been a late start to winter that year. Despite the ice being fifteen centimetres thick in most places on the lake, there were patches measuring four centimetres. The hole found by the recovery team measured 60 metres long.

“These super-warm states have always been there, but I do think that the extremes are getting more frequent and harder,” Schnuelle says. “It’s no longer the odd -2 C day, it warms up all of a sudden and you’re sitting at 8 C.”

In 2021, Schnuelle and three others were creating a trail near McCabe Creek on the Yukon River on snowmobiles for an upcoming sled dog race, when one of the machines fell through the ice. The driver survived, though the sled did not. For Schnuelle, it was a wake-up call as to the severity of change.

“I used to be one of those old rough and tough mushers, ‘Oh, I’m not taking an inReach, I can get my own ass out of the bush,’ ” he laughs, referring to the small satellite communication devices increasingly popular in the backcountry. “But heck yeah, I’m carrying one now. The chances are higher. The chances are definitely getting higher.”

Increasing freeze-thaw cycles are bad for races — and for the dogs

Nathaniel Hamlyn grew up being pulled by his family’s Siberian huskies on the ice road in Yellowknife, NWT. But it wasn’t until he heard the stories of adventure from a Yellowknife-based musher named Marcel Marin, who raced in the Quest in 2005, that Hamlyn became “hooked” on sled dog racing.

In 2014, Hamlyn moved to Whitehorse to study environmental sciences at Yukon University and never left. He set up a small dog kennel (a word used by mushers to describe a team of dogs) in the Grizzly Valley, north of Whitehorse, and began training for long-distance races. In 2018, he finished his first 1600-kilometre Quest. 

The following year, Hamlyn signed up again. But that winter was unseasonably warm and the ice on the Yukon River opened up as he was almost in Fairbanks. 

“There were moments when I was running on an island of ice with water flowing on either side of me,” Hamlyn says. After he crossed, the race officials shut down that section of the trail, rerouting mushers.

Today, Hamlyn lives in Mendenhall Landing, west of Whitehorse, with his partner, Louve Tweddell, also a musher. Their combined kennels total 30 dogs, and he trained his team for a 280-kilometre race in the Yukon Quest this year.

Hamlyn has noticed changes on the Yukon landscape in the last decade. He says it’s not so much warming as it is about variability that’s disruptive, particularly an increasing frequency of freeze-and-thaw cycles.

“They come out of nowhere, which makes it hard to be out on the land and enjoying the snow,” Hamlyn says.

When the snow rapidly melts, ice crystals become compacted, “almost like concrete and really hard on the dogs’ joints and paws,” Hamlyn explains. In a sudden melting event, mushers often need to choose between putting cloth booties on dogs’ feet to protect them from abrasion, and making sure they don’t overheat.

Mushers rely on temperature stability for the best conditions to train and race. 

“You need the layering, the many snow events to build up, and if it stays cold, you can build up that base — and the snow has give, which is better for the dogs’ joints,” Hamlyn says.

But regular snowfalls have become unreliable in Whitehorse, challenging mushers’ ability to even train their dogs for races.

Four years ago, Michael Burtnick and his partner Abby relocated their kennel from Teulon, a small town north of Winnipeg, Man., to Mendenhall Landing. They have 26 working dogs and run a tourism company, offering guided sled dog adventures on the land around their property. Burtnick’s passion, however, lies in racing. He and his team travelled on the historic Yukon Quest trail in 2023, competing in the 400-kilometre race. This year, they trained for the 720-kilometre race on the Quest’s new overland route from Teslin to Ross River and back.

“We’re going out training when it’s -40 C and then a week later we’re dealing with rain — that’s been new to us over the past five years,” Burtnick says, noting they began dealing with similar challenges in Manitoba, too. “It’s definitely not an isolated trend [in the Yukon]. You never know what you’re going to get, season to season.”

That unpredictability means mushers need to be constantly paying attention while travelling on the land, especially around water crossings, he says.

Benoit Turcotte, a senior researcher and hydrologist at Yukon University, encourages people travelling on the land to check for open water by looking at satellite imagery of lakes and rivers weeks before they depart.

“In a normal Yukon winter you’d take your dog, or snow machine or whatever mode of travel and cross a wetland or pond, and you’d have no problem,” Turcotte says. 

But in a year like this one — where Whitehorse received heavy snowfall in mid-October, before the ground, or waterways could freeze solid — he says he’d steer clear of wetlands. Early snow, Turcotte says, insulates the ground, along with ponds and wetlands, preventing the formation of thick ice cover that’s safe enough for travel.

When Burtnick trains his team for races, some of their trails include crossing ice that has formed over running water. He admits close observation can only go so far, however. 

“Even if it’s cold on the surface, underneath the ice could be melting and thinning. There’s no visual indication on top. We find the ice that was good last week, is not good this week. We have to be especially careful.”

In 2024, a musher and their team fell through the ice at Taye Lake, which drains into the Mendenhall River. They survived, but had to be treated for severe frostbite.

This winter, Burtnick began wearing a Mustang survival suit, a one-piece snow suit with built-in flotation, when he crosses larger bodies of water. It was “a gift” he says, from a concerned family member. “When you let that sink in for a bit, it makes you question what’s going on around us,” Burtnick says. “Because it wasn’t like this 10 years ago.”

World’s most famous dog sled race route was altered this year because there is no snow at all in places

Much has changed over the last decade in mushing communities in the Yukon and across North America, too. Even the dogs, themselves, have changed. 

Fast disappearing from the scene are stocky, thick-coated huskies, as mushers opt to mix short-haired hounds and pointers that can better handle increasingly warm days into their kennel bloodlines.

“You can dress a dog up,” Hamlyn quips, “But you can’t dress a dog down.”

Another trend that’s impacting mushers in the Yukon, in part due to climate change and the increasing costs of food and gas, is that sled dog kennels’ are shrinking in size. Kennels of 50, 60 dogs are becoming a “thing of the past.”

Mushers are downsizing rapidly and it’s not a trend unique to the Yukon, Burtnick says.

Hamlyn agrees. He estimates it costs roughly $12,000 to feed his 13 dogs year round. One of his females is currently pregnant, but after raising her litter, he won’t breed again, he says. In 10 years, Hamlyn expects to phase out of the competitive racing game altogether.

As for the Yukon Quest, it’s not likely the historic 1,600-kilometre race that followed the Yukon River will ever make a comeback, Schnuelle says. Too much has drastically changed with weather being only one factor of many. People who once lived along the historic route have moved to larger centres. Fewer locals know how to read the intricacies of the land in localized places — and safely put in trails — than in decades past.

Even the world’s most famous race, the Iditarod, which takes place every March, is grappling with climate change. Over the past decade, mushers have faced increasing frequency of low-snowpack years and above-average temperatures. On Feb. 17, officials changed the start location from Willow to Fairbanks, Alaska, as a result of absolutely no snow — the ground is totally bare following an early melt — over 65 kilometres of trail between Rohn and Nikolai.

Iditarod officials called that section of trail impassable probably hoping to avoid a repeat of 2014, when mushers who passed that section under similar circumstances paid the price in broken sleds, and worse, broken bones. Four-time Quest winner Hans Gatt collided with a tree and endured a nasty wound to the head.

This is the third time in a decade that race officials have changed the start location due to no snow. 

“I am not too certain anymore if we will be able to talk about these long-distance races in 15 years,” Schnuelle says. “Things have changed drastically and the races need to adapt.”

The spirit of the North lives on, in a new form

In February, both Hamlyn and Burtnick ran teams on the inaugural trail of the new Yukon Quest. Despite criticisms of the new trail being “less technical” than the historic one, rolling hills coupled with extreme cold created challenging conditions for teams. 

Hamlyn sweated as he helped his team up and over the steep hills, running alongside the sled. At -40 C, the down insulating material in his parka froze. Meanwhile, Burtnick suffered frostbite to his nose and hands. 

“Your care comes second to the dogs, so you make sure those dogs are fed before you start taking care of your own hands,” he says.

They both had mixed sentiments about the new trail: a sense of loss for the historic route along the Yukon River, and a gain because there’s still a race to train for, Hamlyn says. 

Burtnick described the experience of travelling through the mountainous sections of the new trail, particularly between Quiet Lake and Ross River, as beautiful and humbling.

And for this new generation of mushers, despite the uncertain future of their sport, that’s what it’s all about. 

“I’m still out there with my dogs,” Burtnick says. “I’m still mushing and that’s the spirit of the North.”

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In the small port town of Skagway, a village wedged between glacier-capped mountains and icy waters at the northern end of Alaska’s Inside Passage, there is a wooden pier known as the ore dock.

Although it mostly hosts cruise ships these days, the ore dock got its name because it has, in the past, been used to ship the ore dug up from mines in the neighbouring Canadian territory of the Yukon out into the wider world. It might, one day, be put to this use again — in fact, the Yukon government has currently budgeted $44.65 million to redevelop Skagway’s ore dock for future use by Yukon mines. 

But no one seems quite certain when or if the redevelopment project will actually go ahead. And if it does, who exactly would use it. Or, for that matter, why the Yukon would pay to upgrade the infrastructure of a foreign port for the hypothetical use of hypothetical private businesses. 

When The Narwhal started digging into the story of the ore dock, rather than finding clear answers, we mostly found more questions. 

Here, then, is our best attempt at an incomplete explanation of just what the heck is going on with Skagway’s ore dock. 

Why is there an ore dock in Skagway? Isn’t it a cruise ship town?

It’s true that Skagway is, today, one of the best-known ports for cruise ships travelling up the coasts of British Columbia and Alaska. The town, home to little more than a thousand year-round residents, swells in the summer with hundreds of seasonal workers and well over one million cruise ship passengers, who come to buy souvenir T-shirts and crane their necks up at the mountains, or to travel on bus tours up into the alpine moonscape above town, where stampeders once toiled on their way north to the Klondike gold fields. But that’s a relatively recent phenomenon. Before the cruise ships started arriving in force in the 1990s, the port revolved around mineral ore. As a 1989 report from Alaska’s Department of Health put it, Skagway was “the only seaport serving the vast Canadian Yukon Territory, and lead and zinc ore shipments from the Yukon Territory are a major contributor to the town’s economy.” Those shipments came from the Faro mine, a now-notorious contaminated site that was once the world’s largest open pit lead-zinc mine. Beginning in the late 1960s, Faro shipped its ore out to Skagway by rail, where it was loaded onto ships for transit to smelters elsewhere.

Faro closed for the first time in 1982, and that’s when the railroad shut down too. The mine then cycled through a couple of re-openings, renewed closures and ownership changes. During that period, its ore was shipped to Skagway by truck. According to that 1989 Health Department report, ore trucks arrived in Skagway “approximately every 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, 362 days a year.” The ore, transported in a powdered form called concentrate, was stored in a warehouse and then loaded onto ships, via a conveyor belt, roughly every 14 days. 

“Back in the day when they were bringing truckloads of ore in, they didn’t even have covers on the trucks,” says Andrew Cremata, who served as mayor of Skagway from 2019 to 2023. “So this ore dust was blowing all over town and then dumping into the basin.” Hence the Health Department report, which attempted to assess the levels of lead in Skagway residents’ blood, as well as contamination in the harbour and around town. (Among other things, the report recommended residents wash their hands frequently, and mop their floors often, to reduce their exposure to lead dust carried on the wind.)

Faro’s last owners went bankrupt and abandoned the mine in 1998, saddling Canadian taxpayers with an estimated $2-billion cleanup. Skagway, meanwhile, was left with a harbour sea-floor laced with lead, zinc and mercury. A 2018 report found “the mass of the contamination present in sediment is still influencing aquatic food chains.”

Why did Skagway put up with this mess?

It wasn’t really within the local government’s control. In the 1960s, as the Faro mine was coming online, the White Pass & Yukon Route railroad took out a 55-year lease on the Skagway waterfront. And although the trains stopped running in 1982 (and then restarted again as a tourist attraction a few years later), the lease continued. Citizens of Skagway voted not to renew the White Pass lease in 2015, and preparations for the municipality to take over management of the port spanned several years. (The port was a focus of Cremata’s campaign for mayor and his tenure in office.) Skagway didn’t fully regain control of the ore dock until the lease finally expired in 2023.

In the meantime, the Yukon’s Minto copper mine went into production in 2007, and resumed use of the dock and its facilities to ship out its ore. “I think they had some quote-unquote improvements” from the Faro era, Cremata says. But the aging dock and the old conveyor belt were both, he recalls, in poor repair. “It was not only antiquated, it was a joke. And they were trying to convince us to allow them to keep using it after we took over the port. No — I was adamantly against that export.”

Former Minto mine leadership reached by The Narwhal either declined to comment or did not respond by publication time.

In 2023, almost concurrent with Skagway taking over the port, Minto declared bankruptcy. The site was added to the Yukon’s list of abandoned mines; so far, its remediation is budgeted to cost the public at least $20 million more than the $75-million security deposit that Minto had put down before its closure. 

Late last year, the municipal government in Skagway demolished the old ore dock, though parts of the land-based ore facility remain in place, still filled with Minto’s abandoned ore. In July, the Alaska government cut funding that would have helped remediate the site. 

As of this summer, Skagway has built a new dock in its place, capable of offering a berth for large cruise ships — but not ore carriers (despite still being called the ore dock).

Okay, so where does the Yukon government come into all this?

More than a century after the Klondike gold rush, mining remains a pillar of the Yukon’s economy. And Skagway’s port has played a role in the territory’s mineral exports for roughly half that time. So when the town was re-envisioning the ore dock, that did not go unnoticed over the border. 

Skagway’s planned ore dock redevelopment originally included the new cruise ship berth, a roll-on/roll-off docking facility (to be used by ferries, barges and other vessels carrying vehicles), and what’s known as a marine services platform, which could — among other things — be used for future ore shipments.

But when prices for materials and contracting leapt up during the pandemic, and interest rates followed, Skagway was obliged to break the dock redevelopment project into discrete phases. “The first phase was getting the cruise ship part of the dock done,” Cremata says. As for the marine services platform, “It was our take that, if the Yukon government and these mines in the Yukon want to ship ore through our port, then really the users need to pay for it.” Skagway’s unusual location, reachable by road only from the Yukon, means that Yukon mines, rather than Alaska’s, are the primary potential customers. And Skagway’s residents were already paying millions of dollars for the dock teardown and remediation of the harbour and ore facility, Cremata points out. “Why should they pay the bill for cleanup and then also pay the bill for new infrastructure?”

With encouragement from territorial industry groups, the Yukon government got involved. In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Economic Development told The Narwhal that while there is no planned spending on the project in the current fiscal year, $44.65 million has been allocated for the marine services platform in the territory’s five-year capital plan. Negotiations between Skagway and the territorial government to produce a binding agreement for the project are, apparently, ongoing. “We believe our interests are broadly aligned in advancing this project and securing a solution that works for both the Yukon’s industry and the community of Skagway,” the statement says.

In early October 2023, Cremata signed his last ordinance as mayor. Supported unanimously by the council at the time, Ordinance 23-23 requires “that all bulk ore imported or exported through or to the Port of Skagway must be transported in sealed containers.” A “containerization” system like the one envisioned by Ordinance 23-23 would put an end to the era of ore being transported loose in trucks and tumbled into ships via a conveyor belt. Instead, the ore would be sealed into containers at the mine site, which would then be transported by truck and loaded onto the ships, reducing the chances of further contamination.

Neither current Skagway Mayor Sam Bass nor the municipality’s port director responded to interview requests for this story. But in a statement provided to The Skagway News when he was running for election in September 2023, Bass wrote that he supported the idea of sealing ore up in containers for transit through the community.

Wait. Whose containerized ore are we even talking about?

There are no current Yukon mines lining up to use a redeveloped Skagway ore dock. Asked which Yukon mines might be planning to use the facility, the spokesperson for the Department of Economic Development wrote: “The Port of Skagway has historically served as a significant export option for Yukon’s mining industry and we anticipate that this will continue.” 

One theoretical future customer for the revamped ore dock is the Casino project, a proposed gold, copper, molybdenum and silver mine in central Yukon, near the village of Carmacks.

Casino Mining Corp. CEO Sandeep Singh told The Narwhal the company is in talks with the Municipality of Skagway about the town’s needs and priorities related to the Casino project. “The Port of Skagway is the closest tidewater access to the proposed Casino project as we work to provide much-needed critical minerals to Canada’s energy transition and multi-generational social and economic benefits to Yukoners.” (In December 2023, Casino president and then-CEO Paul West-Sells had called the Yukon government’s investment in the port a “step in the right direction to advancing the Casino project.”)

“So we’ve got a lot of Yukon taxpayers’ money being spent in another country to theoretically facilitate a private mine that’s going to cost billions to get up and running,” says Lewis Rifkind, the longtime mining analyst for the Yukon Conservation Society. (Rifkind retired shortly after this interview.) “The Casino mine is going to be as big as Faro, which I think is a terrible — and also a good — example to compare it to, environmentally, because of the mess it could make. So why is the Yukon government paying to upgrade an ore dock that could or could not maybe be used by a mine that might or might not go ahead?”

Who should pay for Yukon’s mining industry?

For the Yukon Conservation Society, the biggest concern about any further redevelopment of Skagway’s ore dock is that “it will help facilitate Casino,” Rifkind says.

The potential risks posed by Casino are so significant that, in 2016, the Yukon Environmental and Socio-Economic Assessment Board ruled that it would be the first mine ever subjected to its highest level of review. Back then, the two headliners were the mine’s tailings dam — then slated to be the world’s highest ever — and its impact on the Klaza caribou herd. Today, in the wake of the heap leach pad collapse and resulting cyanide spill at Victoria Gold’s Eagle mine near Mayo, Yukon, it seems likely that Casino’s own planned heap leach pad will also be under greater scrutiny.

In the Alaskan coastal village of Haines, Skagway’s nearest neighbour, Lynn Canal Conservation executive director Jessica Plachta is also watching closely.

At one point, when Minto was still operational and it had become clear that Skagway would be taking back its dock, there was a proposal to move the old Faro-era ore loader over from Skagway to Haines and to ship Minto’s ore from there instead. “For the community of Haines,” Plachta says, “it’s a cautionary tale. Here’s our neighbour, 15 nautical miles away, that’s had this catastrophic history with mine exports, and there’s no real reason to think that it would be any different for us.” 

“I think taxpayers on both sides of the border have reason to be very concerned about these projects that are funnelling public money into funding private industry,” she adds. “The burden on communities is just untenable.”

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A great expanse of tundra in the northeast corner of the Yukon is now protected by an Indigenous-led conservation area, safeguarding important Inuvialuit harvesting areas for future generations.

Aullaviat/Anguniarvik Traditional Conservation Area covers almost 850,000 hectares of land nestled between the Beaufort Sea to the north, Ivvavik and Vuntut national parks to the west and the Northwest Territories to the east. With the establishment of this new conservation area, a decades-old vision to protect the northern stretch of the Yukon used by the Porcupine caribou herd comes to fruition.

“That’s one of our main sources of harvesting and in this day and age I think you need to protect that. Because something that money can’t buy is the food that we eat and the traditions that we practice on the land,” Billy Storr, a member of the Aullaviat/Anguniarvik working group and president of the Aklavik Hunters and Trappers Committee, told The Narwhal.

The new conservation area is also significant as Canada strives to meet its international commitments to protect 30 per cent of land and waters by 2030, as part of global efforts to stem nature losses. The Yukon is leading conservation efforts among provinces and territories, having protected 21.1 per cent of land, including Aullaviat/Anguniarvik, which covers 1.8 per cent of the territory.

“Indigenous-led conservation is one of the most important pathways for achieving Canada’s biodiversity goals and sustaining long-term conservation gains,” federal Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault said in a press release.

Aullaviat/Anguniarvik protects ‘a magical place’

Generations of Inuvialuit have hunted caribou, fished and harvested berries in Aullaviat/Anguniarvik (pronounced Au-la-vat/Angu-niag-a-vik). And for the community of Aklavik, a small hamlet north of the Arctic Circle in the Northwest Territories, the area continues to be very important.

“It’s been in our history for years, and it’s going to be in our history for more years to come,” Michelle Gruben, the resource person for the Aklavik Hunters and Trappers Committee, said.

“The wording Aullaviat/Anguniarvik means ‘where the animals travel through and where people harvest,’ ” Gruben explained.

Every summer Gruben travels from Aklavik, just east of the Yukon border, with her family to Shingle Point in Aullaviat/Anguniarvik on the Arctic coast to harvest fish, caribou and berries. There’s always a cool breeze coming off the water, she said. “You might see caribou running along the beach.”

“It’s just a magical place,” Gruben said. To see it named Aullaviat/Anguniarvik is “so exciting,” she adds. “I even get little goosebumps on my arm as I’m talking.”

A trust fund is being established with a federal contribution of $10 million and an additional $3.5 million from philanthropic foundations. The fund will support the implementation of a management plan and the development of a stewardship and Guardians program.

“This funding will allow Inuvialuit in Aklavik to get out on the land, share knowledge between generations, fill our freezers and secure a healthy and vibrant future for our young people and for Aklavik,” Jordan McLeod, the president and chair of the Aklavik Community Corporation, said in the press release. “We need to be out on the land to keep it healthy,” McLeod said.

With more shipping activity in Arctic waters and a growing number of cruise ships requesting to stop at Herschel Island-Qikiqtaruk Territorial Park off the Yukon coast, Gruben said the Guardians program is “very important.”

“They can be our eyes and ears on the land,” she said.

Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry report urged protection for Yukon North Slope from oil and gas development

Inuvialuit have long known the importance of the Yukon North Slope, as the northern stretch of the territory between Alaska and the Northwest Territories has come to be known.

But by the 1970s, its future was threatened. Oil and gas reserves had been discovered at Prudhoe Bay in Alaska in the late 1960s, plans for a gas pipeline right across northern Yukon were on the table and exploration was underway in the Mackenzie River Delta to the east.

The federal government tasked Justice Thomas Berger with assessing the impacts of potential gas pipelines running from Alaska across the northern Yukon to the Mackenzie Delta and then south through the Mackenzie Valley, in what’s known as the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry.

In his landmark 1977 report, which leaned heavily on Indigenous consultation, Berger recommended the entire northern stretch of the Yukon be protected by a wilderness park. Among his key concerns about a northern energy corridor were the risks it would pose to the Porcupine caribou herd.

In 1984, after a decade of negotiations, the federal government and the Inuvialuit signed the Inuvialuit Final Agreement, one of the first modern comprehensive land claim agreements. They agreed the Yukon North Slope would fall under a “special conservation regime” with a goal to protect wildlife, habitat and traditional uses. The agreement also established Ivvavik National Park and Herschel Island-Qikiqtaruk Territorial Park and several co-management bodies. A decade later, the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation Final Agreement established Vuntut National Park just south of Ivvavik.

Inuvialuit negotiators had adopted Berger’s recommendation that the entire Yukon North Slope should be protected by a wilderness park. And, though the region was closed to development, it took a long time — and extensive Indigenous Knowledge and scientific studies — for the parties to the Inuvialuit Final Agreement to agree on a level of conservation for that eastern part of the North Slope, according to Jennifer Smith, chair of the Wildlife Management Advisory Council for the Yukon North Slope. 

Aullaviat/Anguniarvik protects important summer foraging grounds for the Porcupine caribou herd as well as habitat for grizzlies, polar bears, moose and muskox and completes a network of conservation areas protecting the entire Yukon North Slope.

Porcupine caribou herd finds food, respite from bugs in Aullaviat/Anguniarvik Traditional Conservation Area 

The Porcupine caribou range stretches from Alaska across the Yukon and into the Northwest Territories. Each year the herd — a population of more than 200,000 barren-ground caribou, one of the largest herds in Canada — migrates vast distances between the Arctic coast in the spring and their wintering grounds, which in the Yukon fall south of the Porcupine River.

With the establishment of the Aullaviat/Anguniarvik Traditional Conservation Area most of the Porcupine caribou range in Canada is now fully protected. In Alaska, however, critical calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, known as the 1002 lands, remain at risk to potential oil and gas drilling in the future. 

“That’s been a long-going, enduring fight,” Smith told The Narwhal.

Even as efforts to protect Porcupine caribou calving grounds continue, establishing Aullaviat/Anguniarvik in the herd’s summer and fall foraging grounds is a significant milestone.

“When the Porcupine caribou herd is moving through that landscape, it’s like the stillness comes alive with life, with sound, with colour,” Smith said.

Here, the ocean breeze keeps the insects at bay as caribou build up the stores they need to survive the winter, and for cows, the weight they need to support their next pregnancy.

To see this area protected through the Aullaviat/Anguniarvik Traditional Conservation Area is “really significant,” Smith said, adding that “it wouldn’t be possible without the strong vision of Aklavik leadership.”

Storr said he’s “very excited” to see the conservation area finally established.

“We’ve had a few stumbling blocks along the way where it kind of derailed and went off kilter,” he said. “But we were persistent.”

“I’m 71 now, so it’s for my family, and not only my family but all the other families in Aklavik that rely on this area too for harvesting” he said. “That’s something near and dear to my heart.”

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In the wilderness north of Great Slave Lake, in Canada’s Northwest Territories, mining companies are eyeing a potential treasure trove of critical minerals as demand for lithium, nickel, graphite and copper has risen sharply to meet the needs of the burgeoning electric vehicle and solar power industries.

The cost of mining in this and many other roadless parts of northern Canada used to be prohibitive. That changed last December, when the Canadian government announced its highly anticipated critical minerals strategy, which offers mining companies generous tax breaks, $3 billion in additional funding incentives, and a promise to fast-track the federal environmental impact review process.

While the strategy is being touted as a way of helping the world transition to a post-carbon economy, some environmentalists fear that it will result in drained wetlands, diverted streams and the disturbance of carbon-rich peatlands. Over the past three decades, the mining industry has walked away from these and many other environmental liabilities, leaving Canadian taxpayers with cleanup bills amounting to more than $10 billion.

Will benefits of mining outweigh costs to biodiversity and Indigenous people who live there?

“In this transition to renewables, two clear storylines have emerged,” says Teresa Kramarz, a professor and co-director of the Environmental Governance Lab at the University of Toronto and co-chair of the United Nations Development Programme’s Advisory Group on Energy Governance. The first, she says, is the political urgency to rapidly decarbonize, while the second is the enormous business opportunity presented by mining for critical minerals needed for a clean energy revolution.

The blending of these storylines concerns Kramarz, as well as many other scientists and environmentalists, because the overall benefits of mining might not outweigh its costs to biodiversity and to Indigenous people who live in mineral-rich regions.

Nor is there any guarantee that reserves of minerals like lithium are large and accessible enough for Canada to compete with reserves in South America and China, which are much larger and are subject to less environmental oversight.

“The critical minerals strategy is one important step and welcomed, given the need for Canada to strengthen supply chains to support the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources,” says Justina Ray, senior scientist and president of the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada. “But the strategy doesn’t fully appreciate the global [ecological] significance of mining regions such as the Hudson Bay Lowlands, the second largest peatlands in the world.” While peatlands account for only three per cent of the Earth’s land, they store approximately 30 per cent of the planet’s soil carbon. A quarter of the world’s peatlands are found in Canada. What’s needed, says Ray, “is a regional assessment led by federal, provincial and Indigenous leaders to determine whether the trade-offs are worth the cost to biodiversity.”

Most of the critical minerals reserves are located in remote regions of the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and northern Quebec, and in the Hudson Bay Lowlands of northern Manitoba, Ontario and western Quebec.

The mine that Fortune Minerals is exploring in the 3,700-square-mile mineral region north of Great Slave Lake lies within the migratory path of the Bathurst caribou herd, whose numbers have crashed from a high of nearly 470,000 in the 1980s to 6,240 today, due to a number of factors including mining disturbance, overhunting and climate change.

History of mining in northern Canada contains harsh lessons

In the so-called Ring of Fire region, in the 124,000-square-mile Hudson Bay and James Bay Lowlands, mining activity could accelerate the thawing of permafrost that stores nearly 35 gigatons of carbon and degrade the habitat of caribou and the nesting grounds of millions of birds. The Lowlands, according to Jeff Wells, vice-president of boreal conservation for the National Audubon Society, are “astonishingly important.” No other place on the planet has as many red knots, semipalmated sandpipers, dunlins and other nesting shorebird species. The Lowlands also are possibly the most important refuge for woodland caribou, which are now functionally extinct in the United States and disappearing quickly across Canada.

Politically, the critical minerals strategy is a win-win for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. It speaks to the Conservative Party’s demand for more mining jobs and regional economic development while addressing the left-wing New Democratic Party’s demand for climate action.

If the past history of mining in northern Canada says anything about the future, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned, especially with the Ontario, Manitoba and Northwest Territories governments signalling their desire to speed up mining for critical minerals.

Just a few dozen miles from Fortune’s play in the Northwest Territories, the Colomac gold mine’s tailings ponds once overflowed with cyanide and ammonia, triggering a mining inspector to complain of burning eyes and a sore throat just minutes after arriving at the site. After low gold prices finally shut the mine in 1997, Colomac’s $1.5-million security deposit, posted to cover environmental liabilities, didn’t come close to covering the $135-million cleanup that was performed at taxpayer expense.

The final cost of the remediation at Colomac, whose initial phase included construction of a five-mile fence to keep caribou out of contaminated areas, is dwarfed by the resources that continue to be poured into two ongoing remediations.

The Faro zinc mine, which operated in the central Yukon between 1969 and 1998, was once the largest open-pit lead-zinc mine in the world. Today, it is one of the most complex abandoned-mine remediation projects in the country, if not the world. Its 77 million tons of tailings and 353 million tons of waste rock contain high levels of heavy metals, which authorities fear could potentially leach into the mountainous headwaters of many fish-bearing streams. The remediation, which began in the early 2000s, is expected to take between 10 and 15 years at an estimated cost of $500 million or more.

The remediation of the Giant gold mine, on the shores of Great Slave Lake in Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, will cost an estimated $4.38 billion and won’t be completed until 2038. Even then, storing the gold mine’s 261,000 tons of highly toxic, virtually indestructible arsenic trioxide — in frozen underground mine chambers — is anticipated to require perpetual maintenance because groundwater that flows into the mine and rapidly thawing permafrost are undermining its stability. The mine may have to be refrigerated permanently, according to engineers working on remediation options. Since 2016, all 20,000 Yellowknife residents have been warned by the government to avoid drinking water, swimming, fishing and harvesting plants and berries in and around several lakes due to their high arsenic levels.

Since 2002, when the Auditor General of Canada issued a scathing report on 30 abandoned mines in the north, federal, territorial and provincial governments have become more diligent in reviewing mining plans and demanding security deposits to cover the cost of cleanups. But the liabilities continue.

Plans for battery plants in Ontario bolster Canada’s critical minerals strategy

This past May, for example, the Yukon government took over the Minto copper and gold mine on Selkirk First Nation territory after mining inspectors repeatedly warned of the potential for contaminated water to flow into the salmon-bearing Yukon River system. The action was taken less than a year after the owners of the Wolverine Mine, which contains reserves of gold, silver, zinc and copper in the southeast corner of the territory, reneged on paying $19 million in security costs. By then, the Yukon government had already poured millions of dollars into environmental mitigation efforts after an underground portion of the mine flooded in 2017.

Tom Hoefer, executive director of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut Chamber of Mines, says that abandoned mines in the Canadian North “should be a thing of the past” thanks to legislative changes that have addressed the issue of security deposits and created oversight boards that oversee land-use planning, wildlife management, environmental assessment and review, and land and water regulations.

“The driver, of course, was that Indigenous groups also didn’t want to see repeats of environmental messes on their traditional lands,” he said, noting that the law requires that half of the review board members in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut come from an Indigenous community.

Canada’s critical minerals strategy has already attracted a lot of interest and is bound to attract more now that several battery plants, including one proposed by Volkswagen, are in the planning stages in Ontario. The Volkswagen plant will receive a package of subsidies amounting to as much as $10 billion over the next decade.

In addition to fast-tracking the regulatory review process, the federal strategy will give mining companies a generous tax credit, equal to 30 per cent of the capital costs associated with establishing a mine. Priority will be given to mines that produce lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, copper and other critical metals. To entice companies to invest and explore, the government has earmarked $60 million for geoscience and exploration aimed at discovering potential new deposits.

The Canadian government has funded this kind of geo-mapping before, in the hopes of encouraging oil and gas companies to develop energy and mineral reserves in the northern regions of the country. Between 2008 and 2017, more than $75 million was spent helping private companies find new sources of fossil fuels and minerals, but not a barrel of oil or a gigajoule of gas found its way to market. What northerners got instead was tens of thousands of miles of seismic lines — narrow corridors cleared of vegetation — running through formerly frozen peatland that are now releasing untold volumes of greenhouse gases as they thaw.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford pledges to mine in the Ring of Fire, even if he has to “hop on a bulldozer myself”

Provincial leaders tend to be supportive of the new mining projects. Ontario Premier Doug Ford said, “If I have to hop on a bulldozer myself, we’re going to start building roads in the Ring of Fire.” Based on the increased value of critical minerals already established to be in the ground, George Pirie, Ontario’s minister of mines, estimates the mining value of this area at a trillion dollars.

But according to Jamie Kneen, the national program co-lead of Mining Watch Canada, there is little data to back up such claims. He fears that Canada will be left with a lot of holes in the ground and many more environmental liabilities if technological developments come into play and make the critical minerals strategy obsolete.

Charles Kazaz, a Montreal-based lawyer for a firm that advises clients in the mining sector, concedes that demand could drop, but he considers the critical minerals strategy unique for addressing both economic development and climate-change targets. “Canada needs to be aggressive and act fast in order to catch up with the rest of the world,” he says.

Without the strategy, he says, Canada might miss an opportunity because of foreign investment restrictions that prevent countries like China from partnering in critical-mineral development in Canada, and by the constitutional requirement that the government and industry consult with and accommodate Indigenous communities before mines or access roads can proceed.

Indigenous communities are divided over whether to support development of resources within their territories. The recent federal decision to greenlight Nemaska Lithium’s project in northern Quebec is a case in point. The Nemaska Cree band council embraced the mine on the basis that it would provide the community with jobs and royalties. But some Cree, including Thomas Jolly, a former Nemaska chief, don’t think it is worth the risk of contaminating the Rupert River watershed. Neither does Jolly accept the argument that the Cree should agree to the mine to help the world deal with climate change.

“Who is responsible for the climate crisis?” he asked. “Is it up to us to pay and suffer for what they [southerners] have done?”

The Cree communities that live in and around the Ring of Fire, where several mines are already in operation and where at least 15 other companies have more than 26,000 mining claims, are working with conservation groups like the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, the Wildlands League and MiningWatch Canada to make sure that no environmental shortcuts are taken, as federal Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson has promised.

Kramarz, at the University of Toronto, remains skeptical. Like other scientists, she isn’t downplaying the need to aggressively deal with climate change. But she believes that enthusiasm for exploiting critical minerals to speed a transition to carbon neutrality ignores significant costs.

“If that’s the narrative,” she says, referring to industry exuberance, “then it would be good to not forget that there are environmental concerns that need to be thoroughly understood and mitigated.”

Updated on Oct. 10, 2023, at 1:32 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the cost of cleaning up the Colomac mine in the Northwest Territories from $53 million to $135 million. The starting operational date of the Faro mine has also been revised from 1968 to 1969.

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Malkolm Boothroyd is a writer, photographer and campaigns coordinator for the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society Yukon chapter.

About twenty caribou have blocked the road. I pull over to the shoulder and park. It’s a hot July day on the Top of the World Highway, about 90 kilometres northwest of Dawson City, Yukon. A light haze hangs in the air, smoke from wildfires burning across the border in Alaska. 

It’s the Fortymile caribou herd. Some caribou are lying on the gravel, others stand as three-week-old calves nuzzle around their legs. Velvet still coats the antlers of the bulls. Several hundred more caribou are scattered across the mountainsides ahead, and a few dozen are bedded among the stunted alders that furnish the rocky outcrops above the highway. 

It’s been slow going all afternoon. I’d only just gotten back on the road after waiting three hours for a hundred caribou to clear the highway a few kilometres back. I open the truck door and step out, trying to make as little noise as possible. I tiptoe around the back of the truck to where my companions, Chase Everitt and Chris Clarke, have parked. Chase is a fish and wildlife technician and a Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin citizen. Chris works with the First Nation’s Land Stewardship Project. 

The next moment I’m distracted by the roar of wheels churning through gravel. I look up in time to see a white SUV rounding a corner towards us. The vehicle speeds by without slowing down, quickly closing the gap to the caribou. Chris hammers the horn of her truck, and finally the SUV shudders to a halt and reverses back towards us. “There are laws about not harassing wildlife,” Chase tells the driver, a clean shaven guy with greying hair and Alberta plates. “You need to wait until the caribou move off the road.”

“Are you serious?” the man snaps.

He starts venting about public health measures adopted to control the coronavirus pandemic and then circles back to the caribou. He suggests he should be allowed to do what he wants.

“I’m sick of people telling me what I can’t do in my own country.”  

There are stories from a hundred years ago when Fortymile caribou were so numerous that it took days for the herd to cross the Yukon River. The paddlewheelers that plied the river between Whitehorse and Dawson would have to moor up and wait for the caribou to finish crossing. The herd has been through staggering crashes and spikes in the intervening time, from numbering in the hundreds of thousands, to just a few thousand in the 1970s. Concerted efforts to recover the population began in the 1990s. Wildlife authorities in Alaska began an expansive program of predator suppression, while Yukon hunters and the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin stopped harvesting the herd. By 2017, the herd had rebounded to more than 80,000 caribou.

There’s something poetic about the Fortymile herd recovering to a point where it can once again stop traffic, but our Albertan friend doesn’t seem amused. He pulls a U-turn and speeds back towards Dawson, waving his middle finger at us as he disappears.

The Fortymile caribou are one of those animals that everything else seems to revolve around. Bears and wolves follow in the wake of the herd, and the footsteps of countless generations of caribou are etched into the mountainsides. Fortymile caribou sustained the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin, and caribou meat helped to feed the tens of thousands of prospectors who flocked north during the Klondike Gold Rush. This excessive hunting by newcomers drove the herd to crisis, and displaced the First Nation’s harvest. The Fortymile caribou may have faded away for a time, but its recovery is bringing new optimism, as well as new fears.

I’d come here hoping to get photos and videos of caribou to use in the advocacy work I do with the Yukon chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. The Yukon is in the middle of land use planning for the Dawson region, which will determine which parts of the herd’s range will be protected, and how much development can happen in the rest. This is a critical time for the Fortymile caribou. Some biologists worry that food shortages within the herd’s range could trigger another population crash. Meanwhile, new mining developments could encroach upon the herd’s remaining range. The next few years will shape the future of the herd for decades to come.

The memory of the Fortymile caribou still lingers on the landscapes they once inhabited. Ancient caribou trails line mountains in the Dawson Range, even though the herd has not been seen in these lands for more than 60 years. The herd once ranged throughout the central Yukon and Alaska, some winters migrating almost as far south as Whitehorse. One traveller described canoeing down the White River in 1909, where “for forty miles we were running through one continuous mass of caribou. The narrow valley and high bald mountains on either side, swarmed with the animals.” In the 1920s, the herd probably numbered around 250,000, according to Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game.

Profligate hunting of the Fortymile caribou began at the turn of the 20th century and accelerated through the 1930s as new roads opened the highlands to hunters. Historical accounts from game officers in Alaska described people firing into herds — leaving some caribou crippled, and others dead with their meat left to waste. In a single season, 10,000 caribou were killed by hunters in one game district in Alaska. One warden wrote that “most people are content to believe that the animals are in countless numbers that cannot be exhausted.” By the 1930s, the herd was in serious decline. Wolves and wildfires likely worsened the herd’s freefall, and by 1940 fewer than 20,000 remained. The herd had recovered somewhat by 1960, only to plummet again. By 1975, there were only around 5,000 left, according to the Yukon government. The once expansive range of the Fortymile caribou contracted to its very core, in the hills between Dawson City and Fairbanks. 

Thanks to decades of recovery work, there are more than 10 times as many caribou in the Fortymile herd as there were in the 1970s. Still, there hasn’t been a corresponding increase in the herd’s range. It’s hard to say why. The networks of mines that extend south from Dawson City might deter caribou from crossing these habitats, but there are other explanations too. Trees and shrubs are flourishing at ever higher elevations as climate change heats up the north. That means the alpine migration corridors, those places above treeline that once unlocked the central Yukon, may now be too overgrown for caribou to use. It’s also possible that the Fortymile herd has lost its collective memory of its old range and the pathways leading there. Migrations have to be learned, and this knowledge could have died out decades and decades ago with the last of the caribou that ventured into central Yukon.

The herd’s failure to reestablish its old range means that caribou are packed tightly within its core range. Some biologists suspect that the herd has surpassed the carrying capacity of the ecosystems it inhabits — essentially that there aren’t enough grasses, sedges and lichens to sustain 80,000 caribou. Insufficient food makes it less likely for cows to give birth, and more difficult for the calves that are born to survive. There are fears another population crash could be looming. This has led wildlife managers in Alaska to push for more hunting to bring the herd’s population down. The Yukon government and the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin First Nation recently agreed on a new management plan, which includes a small hunt for non-First Nations hunters. It’s a new era for the Fortymile caribou.

The hills surrounding Dawson City trend steadily higher as you go west towards Alaska, and slowly the hilltops begin to shrug off the cloak of the boreal forest. These tundra ridges are the heart of the herd’s summer habitat. In the windswept highlands there’s relief from mosquitoes, and lichens and grasses to feed on. Fortymile caribou give birth to their calves across the border in Alaska, then in late June and early July huge congregations of caribou move into the Yukon, following the ridgelines to skirt the tangles of spruce and alder that fill the valleys.

Many of these ridges are also lined with mining roads, winding away towards placer mines in the valleys and hardrock exploration properties in the alpine. Over a quarter of the herd’s core range is blanketed by quartz mining claims. Study after study — from Alaska and the Yukon, to Alberta and the Northwest Territories — warn of the impacts to caribou from industrial development. Developments like roads, mines and oil and gas infrastructure displace caribou from ecosystems, interrupt migrations, and make it easier for predators like wolves to prey on caribou. 

Big decisions are looming about which parts of the Fortymile caribou herd’s range will be conserved, and which areas will stay open to mining. In the Yukon, decisions like these are made through the territory’s land use planning process, born from the Umbrella Final Agreement between Yukon First Nations and the Crown. In June the Dawson Land Use Planning Commission released the first draft of its plan. The plan divides the Dawson region into 23 different landscape management units, each with its own land use designation. Forty-five per cent of the region has some form of conservation designation, and the rest is open to varying levels of development. 

The plan recommends strong protections for the very core of the herd’s range within the Matson Uplands, a mountain range along the Alaska border, west of Dawson City. But the remainder of the herd’s key range is at risk. Most of the herd’s remaining critical summer range falls within the ‘Fortymile Caribou Corridor’ landscape management unit. This area is divided by elevation, with high elevations open to limited development and low elevations open to moderate development. In alpine habitats, the industrial footprint cannot exceed one quarter of one percent of the landscape. This threshold is relatively low, but it’s calculated by averaging disturbances across the 800 square kilometres of alpine within the unit. High amounts of disturbance could still occur within small areas. Any mining development within ridgetop habitats could interrupt caribou migration corridors, or displace them from key summer habitats.

With a few modifications, the Dawson Land Use Plan could provide strong protections for the Fortymile caribou. It’s critical to keep alpine ridges free from new industrial development, and the plan should designate these habitats as conservation areas. The plan should also ensure there’s ample wintering habitat for Fortymile caribou. Caribou disperse across lower elevations in the winter, and developments within core wintering habitats should remain within levels caribou can tolerate.

The word restore comes up a lot in conversations about the Fortymile caribou herd. There’s restoring the herd to a robust population, and the herd restoring parts of its old range, but it’s equally important to restore people’s connections to the herd.

A few Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin citizens began hunting the herd again in the 2000s, but rebuilding relationships with the herd has been slow. There were generations of Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin who barely hunted the herd. Young people like Chase Everitt are changing that. “I just like seeing animals,” he says. “Even after the shot, it’s not the excitement of ‘I got one’ it’s ‘I get to see it more, see what it actually looks like, everything about it.’ ”

Chase describes his first time hunting the Fortymile caribou. He shot one caribou from a group of four, then the sound of the rifle echoing off the hills set the landscape into motion. Thousands of caribou stirred across the mountains ahead of him. The image sounds a lot like accounts I’d read from a century ago, when people spoke of mountainsides so thick with caribou that the landscape itself seemed alive.

Chris and Chase head back for Dawson. I drive another kilometre up the road, then pack a bag with camera gear and start bushwhacking. I head for the top of a hill, not far from where I’d seen caribou congregating earlier in the day. After a few minutes I break free from a tangle of alders into the clear. Soon a hundred caribou appear just ahead along the ridge. I duck down among a clump of spruce and wait. The caribou burst into a canter and jostle towards me. The herd passes within 30 metres of me. The air is heavy with the sounds of grunting and clicking tendons. Then they’re gone.

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This article was produced with the support of the Local Journalism Initiative.

A draft of the much-anticipated land-use plan for the Yukon’s 40,000 square-kilometre Dawson regional planning area — a sensitive and vibrant northern landscape of cultural importance to the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin First Nation — is due to be released June 15 by the Dawson Regional Planning Commission.

Comprised of salmon-rich rivers, vital caribou habitat and wetlands, which support a wide variety of species from cranberries to moose, the Dawson region is also ground zero for the territory’s bustling placer mining industry, raising questions about how and how much of the landscape should be protected from ongoing and future development.

Under Yukon’s 1990 Umbrella Final Agreement, Yukon is obligated to craft landscape plans in partnership with First Nations to determine the nature and extent of natural resource management and industry in First Nations territories.

In part because of industry interests, the Dawson land use plan has dragged along for many years as mining has carried on in sensitive riverbeds and wetlands. Already the process has hints of the conflict between the mining industry and conservation efforts that stymied the Peel watershed regional land use plan, which ended up being hashed out in the Supreme Court of Canada after a 15-year legal quagmire. 

At the heart of concerns surrounding the fate of the Dawson is the high level of placer mining operations already taking place in the region, and how legacy mining claims grandfathered into the region will impact land use plans going forward.Roberta Joseph, Chief for the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin, says just like with the Peel Watershed, when the Dawson planning process began, there was already a “high level of staking taking place.”

Despite repeated calls from the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin, other First Nations and conservationists, mineral staking has been and still is permitted in the Dawson region, Joseph says, adding her government had been vying for a number of mining withdrawals for different areas in its traditional territory. But Joseph says despite repeated calls for these withdrawals — and some small, late concessions — the discussion with the Yukon government about potential no-go zones for mining just “hasn’t evolved.” 

The Peel Watershed land use plan: ‘the lesson hasn’t been learned’

If the protracted legal battle over the Peel demonstrated anything, it’s that mining withdrawals hold the power to make or break land use plans.

When the Peel plan was first drafted, it came with a recommendation to protect 80 per cent of the watershed from industry. That recommendation was scrapped by the then-Yukon Party government, which floated a new recommendation to protect just 29 per cent of the area from development. The proposal enraged Yukon First Nations and environmentalists, fuelling a legal battle that was eventually resolved in 2017 in a landmark Supreme Court ruling. The judges found that by reducing the amount of conserved areas in the Peel’s land use plan, the territorial government had failed to honour its Treaty obligations to First Nations.

Planning for the Dawson region began as negotiations for the Peel were already underway, with a commission first engaging in the planning process between 2010 and 2014. But the Dawson process was put on the backburner while the Peel challenge played out. 

The Dawson Region Planning Commission was reestablished in November 2018 and has been working ever since on a much-anticipated draft plan. The delays in the process have contributed to tensions around the ongoing level of mineral staking and mining projects that have continued unabated in the Dawson region for the last decade.

Pleas for a pause on claims staking and exploration have gone unheeded, raising questions about how the Dawson planning process will avoid the pitfalls of which beleaguered the Peel plan. Those questions were heightened when Art Webster, the former vice chair of the planning commission publicly resigned. He told The Narwhal the resistance to pausing industry “defeats the purpose of having a land planning process.” 

In response to concerns from environmental groups and First Nations, particularly the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin, the government finally agreed in March to preemptively withdraw approximately 12 per cent of the Dawson planning area from staking — but noted the moratoriums are temporary, pending recommendations from the planning commission. 

Environment minister Pauline Frost said the withdrawals were designed to bring down tensions surrounding what will be mined and what will be protected in the Dawson. 

 “This will minimize future land-use conflicts in areas that are likely candidates for conservation,” Frost said in a statement.

“Compared to the Peel process, (the) Government of Yukon acted more quickly in placing staking withdrawals,” in the Dawson, Yukon Department of Energy, Mines and Resources representative Rachel Veinott-McKeough told The Narwhal via email.

Some onlookers, however, feel this gesture lacked the necessary gusto — and timing — to make much difference in the overall process. 

It’s “far too little, and too late,” Webster said of the withdrawals in an interview with Yukon News.

A day after the withdrawals were announced, the Yukon branch of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS) expressed its disappointment, calling it a “failure to implement meaningful withdrawal … which echoes the mistakes made during the Peel Watershed planning process.” 

“Going into this plan, we had really hoped — no, actually, we had really expected — that the government wouldn’t repeat the same mistakes it had made in the Peel Watershed, where staking wasn’t withdrawn until well into the planning process,” Randi Newton, conservation coordinator for CPAWS, told The Narwhal. 

“Unfortunately, the lesson hasn’t been learned.” 

Jocelyn Joe-Strack, Daqualama, Indigenous research chair at Yukon University and a member of the Wolf Clan of Champagne-Aishihik First Nation, shares the sentiment.

“I do not have confidence that the Dawson planning process, and the upcoming Dawson draft plan, will have honored the spirit and intent of the Umbrella Final Agreement,” Joe-Strack says. “And I do believe it will be a repeat of the Peel.”

By allowing staking up to and during the planning process, the Yukon government is providing a way for mineral claims to be “grandfathered” in, Sebastian Jones, long-time West-Dawson resident and fish, wildlife and habitat analyst for the Yukon Conservation Society, tells The Narwhal. This fundamentally shapes how land use plans and protected areas are laid out, he says. 

The government’s reluctance to institute staking moratoriums prior to land-use planning goes all the way back to the creation of Tombstone Territorial Park, which was officially designated in 2000, he says. During this time developers, fearing potential withdrawals, began a “flurry” of staking in the area. 

“That was the first time we saw mineral claims being staked during a planning process,” Jones says. “It actually changed the shape of Tombstone Park, because this is one of the first times the mineral industry was looking at land being alienated from mineral exploration and development.”

Jones says that while the government was “progressive at the time,” but “by the time they got their poop in a group and withdrew (Tombstone) from staking, the damage had already been done.” 

“There are still active claims in Tombstone and they’re a running sore” in the park, which is located within the Dawson regional area, Jones says. 

Given this history — and the fact that much of the area around Dawson City proper is already heavily staked — it wasn’t a “massive ask” to withdraw areas from staking in the Dawson region while the plan was being developed, Jones says.

“I really don’t understand why the Yukon government was so reluctant to make these withdrawals.” 

More recently, the direct impact of continued staking has flared up in the Antimony Creek area, next door to Tombstone. Prior to the government’s temporary withdrawal, both the Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin and the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun cited serious concerns around a proposed quartz exploration project at Antimony Creek, located in both nations’ traditional territories. Both nations have said the area is of high cultural and subsistence importance to them and that they consider permitting new development on their lands before the Dawson land use planning is complete to be a violation of their Treaty Rights.

Their concerns triggered a pause on the project and a request for more information has been sent from the Yukon Environmental Socio-economic Assessment Board (YESAB) to the project’s proponent, Dawson City-based Ryanwood Exploration Inc., although that is not unusual at this stage of the process, says Lewis Rifkind, mining analyst for the Yukon Conservation Society. When the government finally withdrew the 12 per cent of the Dawson regional area from staking, it included the Antimony Creek area — but, as the map shows, the controversial claim in question still exists, because it was granted prior to the exclusion, Rifkind notes. 

Moreover, if the Yukon assessment board is satisfied with the proponent, it could, in theory, allow the project to move forward as the land planning takes place, Rifkind says, because the right to work on existing, approved projects hasn’t been pulled, only the ability to stake new ones. 

“They’ve withdrawn staking rights, but [that claim] is grandfathered in,” Rifkind told The Narwhal. 

In the meantime, Joseph says the pause in the Antimony Creek project is the direct result of Trʼondëk Hwëchʼin First Nation’s concerns.

“We hope that the permitting and licensing agencies take into account that there is active land use planning in the area,” she says.

Similar issues arose in the case of the Peel, which saw a land use plan for the watershed finally signed in 2019. Claims that exist in now-protected areas can’t be developed, Jones says, so most owners have likely “written them off.” But, Jones notes, those claims haven’t been formally extinguished, but rather left “in limbo.” 

“They haven’t been grandfathered in — but they haven’t been grandfathered out, either,” Jones says.

“To me, that really speaks to the importance of having land use plans in place.”

Yukon mining system ‘exploitative, colonial’: expert

The issue extends far beyond the Dawson region. In recent months, Carcross/Tagish First Nation filed a suit against the Yukon government regarding the approval of two subdivision applications on their traditional territory, which the First Nation says it was not adequately consulted about, an action the First Nation says is in contravention of their final agreement. 

Days later, on March 15, the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun also launched a suit against the Yukon government for granting advanced mineral exploration rights in the Tsé Tagé (Beaver River) watershed, where land use planning is underway but is not yet completed. The First Nation not only claims this is contrary to the practicality and spirit of the land use planning process, but that it actively undermines that process and is “disrespectful.” 

Newton says allowing staking or mineral development to take place on landscapes where land use planning is underway creates uncertainty for industry and First Nations, calling it “a strange situation of the government’s own making.” 

“I don’t understand the logic of it,” Newton says. “I think you could call it a gap — or a flaw — in our current legislation.”

“Really, the ideal situation would be either a withdrawal of staking and development — a temporary one — while planning is going on. Or, if staking is permitted, that it’s really clear … if there’s going to be limits set on development.”

This uncertainty was a major point of conflict in the Peel land process; the Yukon government does not intend to compensate the grandfathered claim holders in that region, much to the consternation of the Yukon Chamber of Mines. 

Veinott-McKeough, from the Yukon department of energy, notes neither the Umbrella Final Agreement nor the First Nation Final Agreements state mineral staking “should be withdrawn, or development not permitted before regional land use plans are finalized for an area.”

“Both the Yukon Placer Mining Act and the Quartz Mining Act permit free-entry staking unless there is a withdrawal order that restricts staking,” Veinott-McKeough said in an email. “Staking withdrawals have been put in place for a number of reasons over the years, including for land use planning processes in place.” 

Once mineral tenure is assigned through staking, an assessment and authorization process must be satisfied before any development can commence, she added. “The assessment considers social and environmental impacts, and authorization is not granted until there has been consultation with the affected First Nations, and mitigations are in place for potential impacts.”

The government assumes they have authority over all Crown land, Joe-Strack says, adding several previous governments have tried to assert that assumption. “But it’s untrue … it’s to be managed with the First Nations.”

Jones says the grounds on which the government has proceeded with staking during the land use planning process is “shaky.”

“Basically, no one has ever tried (the government) on it,” Jones says.

 He points to the free-entry staking system as the root of this issue, something he described as “an anachronism” — one that will likely change in the future, even though mining interests view alterations to it as “a threat” to the way they’ve always done things in the territory and will “go down kicking and screaming” to try to keep it the way it is. 

The newly released Yukon Mineral Development Strategy recommended the Yukon government modify “the free-entry staking system to be consistent with Yukon’s modern treaties, court-guided agreements and case law.” 

Joe-Strack takes an all around more critical look at the land planning process in Yukon; the land planning process itself, as it has been applied, runs counter to the philosophies of the First Nations on whose land it takes place, she says, with much of the work, done by people who have never set foot on the land they are making such big and powerful recommendations about. This system itself is “map-based, exploitive” and “colonial” in nature, she says. 

“The First Nation approach to land planning is a complete flip of the Western approach to land planning,” she says, adding that the word ‘use’ should be removed from the idea of land use planning, so that it instead becomes about “obligation and responsibility” to both the land and the people who will live on it, now and in the future. 

“It’s all about ensuring that we take care of the land, and we come to understand the needs of the land, so we can … nurture it, and in turn, be nurtured by it … and (move) forward to the type of society that we would like to create for our children, that sees them living closer and more honorably and equitably with the land,” she says. “That is a very, very big difference.”

Still, Joe-Strack is optimistic and believes that change is on the horizon. 

“It’s really disheartening to see these overt colonial mentalities being carried out. It’s really frustrating — but change is coming,” she says, adding that she believes in the near future this way of thinking will not only no longer be “acceptable” but “shamed.” 

“I still have a lot of hope — and a lot of patience.”

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On a sunny winter day in the southern Yukon, Fish Lake is a magnet for recreationalists. Tiny fishing huts dot the ice. Snowmobiles roar in the distance. Fat bikers follow a packed path through the snow, while barking dogs race along the lakeshore. A line of cars and trucks winds down from the popular hiking trail up into the alpine.

Nighttime brings bonfires, people hoping to see the Northern Lights and, occasionally, fireworks.

What’s left from all this activity is, often, piles of human and dog poop, plastic bags, beer cans, diapers, McDonald’s cups, used pads and tampons and nails from wooden pallets that partiers bring to burn, according to one tourism operator who works and lives in the area.

From Whitehorse, Fish Lake — Łu Zil Män in Southern Tutchone — is about a 20-minute drive along a paved road that turns to dirt once you leave city limits. A couple of signs en route advise motorists that the wilderness bordering the road belongs to the Kwanlin Dün First Nation. As you turn the last bend, the view opens up: the lake — blinding white in the winter and deep, dark blue in the summer — surrounded by mountains.

For years, Kwanlin Dün citizens have been concerned about the increasing use of Fish Lake. Whitehorse’s population is growing — in 2020, it was up 23.5 per cent from 10 years ago — and the area is easily accessible, with a road that’s plowed through the winter.

That’s why the First Nation and the Yukon government have begun working on a land-use plan that will guide the future of Fish Lake, in part by designating different uses for the area, such as residential, commercial, traditional or environmental protection.

“We know that if we don’t act now, the problems out there will only get worse,” says Kwanlin Dün Chief Doris Bill. “So we need to figure out a way to coexist.”

Fish Lake is a critically important area to Kwanlin Dün. It was part of the First Nation’s seasonal travels to food sources in what is today the Whitehorse area. Families had camps there; many would arrive in the summer and stay through the winter. Trout spawned in September, followed by whitefish — Łu Zil Män means “whitefish lake”— in October and November.

After the fish runs, hunters headed into the mountains around the lake for sheep, moose and caribou. In the spring, people trapped beaver and muskrat, and grayling spawned in Bonneville Lakes, in the alpine alongside Fish Lake.

An archaeology project at the lake in 1993 uncovered stone knives, spear points and scrapers, as well as thousands of chips and flakes — the byproduct of making stone tools. According to Uncovering the Past, a book published by Kwanlin Dün in 1994, these findings showed that people have been using the site for more than 5,000 years. 

An old Tagish story describes two giant fish — a male and a female — that live in Fish Lake and keep it stocked. On warm summer days, the story goes, you can still sometimes spot the two huge creatures moving through the water. In Tlingit, it was called Dis Hini, or Moon Lake, because some believed the lake was run by the moon and would set their nets according to its phases.

“The Fish Lake area is very special to our people,” Bill says. “I have family that lives in the area. We use the area to carry out traditional activities, such as hunting, fishing, berry-picking, medicine-picking. It’s an area that is well-used by our citizens.”

The area’s importance is reflected in Kwanlin Dün’s final agreement, a modern treaty the First Nation signed with the federal and territorial governments in 2005. The document designates Kwanlin Dün’s settlement lands — land it owns and manages. About 80 square kilometres in the Fish Lake area fall into this category.

The First Nation’s self-government agreement, also signed in 2005, outlines the development of local area plans — the process now underway at Fish Lake.

Local area plans are written by the Yukon and First Nations governments for unincorporated communities all over the territory, with the goal of identifying residents’ vision, minimizing land-use conflict and providing a framework for future development.

In January, the planning process began for Fish Lake. Over the next two years, a steering committee made up of three government and three Kwanlin Dün appointees will produce the plan. Both parties have signed a memorandum of understanding, which, among other things, commits them to incorporating both Indigenous and Western knowledge.

Once the plan is written, the committee will present it to the two governments for approval. (Ta’an Kwäch’än Council, another First Nation, will be involved too, since some of its traditional territory is within the 460-square-kilometre planning area.)

Fish Lake is unique from other places in the Yukon that already have local area plans. For one, there aren’t many residential lots — it’s a largely undeveloped area.

This is also the first local area plan to be produced under Kwanlin Dün’s new Lands Act, Nan kay sháwthän Däk’anúta ch’e (“We look after our land” in Southern Tutchone). With this legislation, the First Nation is able to create and enforce laws on its settlement lands. The act also formalizes specific regulatory tools so the First Nation can allocate land to citizens and beneficiaries, and lease it to the general public.

“Our people are now going to be getting out onto the land,” Bill says. “They’re going to be building houses, they’re going to be building hunting camps, they’re going to be building cabins.”

The plan has been years in the works. In 2008, after the Yukon government saw an increase in applications for rural residential lots in the Fish Lake area, a study recommended that a plan be in place before any more lots were added.

The First Nation also commissioned a study last year to learn more about commercial use of Fish Lake.

Sky High Wilderness Ranch, which operates dog-sled tours in the winter and horseback rides in the summer, is the largest business based in the area, just a short walk north of the lake. But many other commercial tour operators, from aurora viewing to snowmobiles to dog sleds, also use the area.

“We have evidence to suggest that over the last 20 years, commercial users in the area have increased from 500 people a year to 5,000 people a year,” says Roy Neilson, Kwanlin Dün’s acting manager of planning. “And that doesn’t even account for the private recreational use of the area … Some anecdotal evidence suggests that in the summer, hiking in the area over the last 10 years has at least doubled.”

Jocelyne LeBlanc, a co-owner of Sky High, has seen the byproducts of this. When she moved to the ranch 10 years ago, she’d walk down to the lake on Monday mornings and pick up trash from weekend visitors. Now, she says, that’s a daily job.

“It’s pretty disappointing,” she says. “Fish Lake is a beautiful area … it’s more than a party zone.”

Several cabins owned by Kwanlin Dün citizens, some of them dating back many years, sit along the lake. Bill says these structures have also been damaged or disturbed by visitors.

The First Nation has taken measures to educate the public about its traditional use of the land. Since 2018, Kwanlin Dün has asked hikers and berry-pickers to stay off the popular trail between 5 p.m. and 10 a.m., when its citizens hunt in the area. That year, the First Nation’s lands operations manager told the Yukon News that some hikers had called conservation officers to report gunshots, seemingly unaware that citizens are allowed to hunt there.

Now, a sign at the trailhead informs visitors that they’re on settlement land and people hunt in the area in the fall.

Another concern is that growing traffic in the alpine around Bonneville Lakes might affect the caribou herd that winters there. A second sign at the trailhead offers information about snowmobiling in caribou habitat.

Kwanlin Dün also has land stewards that patrol its traditional territory, picking up garbage, conducting wildlife surveys and educating people in the backcountry.

“I don’t think that we’re going to prevent anybody from using the area,” says Bill. “If they do, we’re just asking them that they follow the rules and to help us keep it in a good condition for future generations … We’ve used it for millennia and I’m hoping that we can continue to use the land far into the future.”

According to a backgrounder written by both governments, the plan will help by addressing how to promote First Nations culture and history, how to manage tourism and recreation and what kinds of commercial use are appropriate.

Both Bill and Neilson emphasize that the process is collaborative.

“It’s not a zero-sum negotiation,” Neilson says. “Sometimes people can get concerned that their rights are being restricted or will be limited, which is not the intention.”

While the First Nation has the authority to impose laws — for instance, banning hikers during autumn evenings rather than asking politely — Bill says that’s not being considered at this point.

“I’m hoping that heightened awareness will result in people taking better care of the land and appreciating what we have,” she says.

And as more Kwanlin Dün citizens receive land allocations and begin building cabins or camps in the area, Bill says she hopes awareness and respect extend to their increased presence too.

“They have every right to be there … We want to assure people that we want to take care of the land, we respect it and we want to be good neighbours.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This article was produced with the support of the Local Journalism Initiative.

When Richard Wyman, president of Calgary-based Chance Oil and Gas, thinks about the Eagle Plains Basin in northern Yukon, he conjures images of a small, bustling oil and gas operation providing a region that’s remote with much-needed energy and jobs. 

That vision was in mind when Chance submitted a proposal to the Yukon Environmental and Socio-economic Assessment Board for a workover of eight idle wells owned, but not currently operated, by the company. The maintenance proposal, which includes flow testing to assess the basin’s resource potential, could lay the groundwork for a new exploration program in the Eagle Plains, an expansive area of rolling hills between mountain ranges 400 kilometres north of Dawson City.

Wyman told The Narwhal upwards of 30 exploration wells could eventually be drilled in the Eagle Plains if there’s enough gas there to make it financially worthwhile.

The possibility of development in the sensitive area is reigniting concerns about the impact oil and gas development would have on the Porcupine caribou herd, one of the largest migratory barren ground caribou herds in North America, which over-winters on the plains. It’s also forcing Yukoners to address whether or not the territory should consider fossil fuel development in a time of climate crisis, the impacts of which are being felt more acutely in the North than in the rest of the world.

The Chance proposal comes in response to a nudge from the Yukon government to assess the suspended wells and either shut them up for good, in a process known as well abandonment, or convert them to active wells once again. Four of the wells are legacy wells bought by Chance that date back to the ’50s and ’60s. The other four wells were drilled by Chance in 2012 and 2013, before the territory introduced a 2015 moratorium on fracking (the company has so far been unsuccessful in its attempt to sue the Yukon government for $2.2 billion in claimed damages stemming from that ban). Now Chance is hopeful that, with enhanced flow testing, some of the wells might show signs of oil and gas resources that could be developed without the use of fracking.

But others say there’s no point in searching for resource potential in an area that should remain permanently closed to oil and gas development.

“It’s always been an extremely marginal project, which is why it’s not gone anywhere,” Sebastian Jones, wildlife and habitat analyst for the Yukon Conservation Society, told The Narwhal. 

“It’s a very remote area. It’s expensive to operate, the conditions are harsh. There’s never been any bankable resources there.”

Jones said oil and gas development in the Eagle Plains “risks causing damage and harm to the environment for no obvious reason.”

But Wyman says the full economic potential for development in Eagle Plains is currently unknown.

“The sedimentary basin has not been fully explored,” Wyman told The Narwhal. 

“If operations are allowed to proceed and the exploration program is successful, it could have a profound economic benefit, both to the territory and the north Yukon, where it’s economically depressed.”

Eagle Plains drilling a test for Yukon climate strategy

Wyman’s interest in creating jobs in the remote region is shared by some Yukoners and members of First Nations who have submitted public comments in support of potential development. Peter Charlie, from the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation community of Old Crow, about 195 kilometres northwest of the potential development area, said he supports the idea of oil and gas taking off in the region. “We need work. It would be good to have people working. There is not much happening up here [in Old Crow], right now,” Charlie said in a submitted comment delivered by phone. “Everyone is going through a hard time. We have to get jobs up here. A lot of young people are not even doing nothing up here. Everyone is talking about this project. We have to get something going here. The project would give us work. It would be good for young kids too.” 

The proposal, currently moving through a slow review process with the board, has also attracted a significant amount of criticism, notably for its potential to introduce ecological threats to a delicate northern ecosystem for a fossil fuel project that seems out of step with the territory’s own climate strategy. 

The territory’s emissions grew by 11.8 per cent between 2009 and 2017, the most recent year for which data is available. In its 2020 climate change action plan, the Yukon government emphasized the need for more renewable energy, especially for the territory’s remote and often diesel-dependent communities, to meet a goal of reducing emissions 30 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030.

There is very little oil and gas development in Yukon and the vast majority of the territory’s electricity needs are met by hydroelectricity. But many remote communities not connected to the territory’s grid rely on costly, and highly polluting fossil fuels that are imported from other provinces. The territory currently spends about $50 million annually on fossil fuel imports.

Wyman argues there’s an environmental advantage to developing oil and gas in the territory, pointing out that Yukon is heavily reliant on fossil fuels for energy generation that have a high emissions footprint because they have to be transported in from out-of-territory.

“However you want to slice it, there’s thousands and thousands of kilometres of supply line … with its own greenhouse gas emissions,” he said. “If we were to find some hydrocarbons that were suitable for consumption in Yukon, we would significantly reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the supply line. You’re going to get a net impact that’s positive.”

“The only question is going to be, does the Yukon give a shit about all the greenhouse gas emissions that are emitted outside the territorial boundary?”

Shortly after Yukon’s governing Liberals were voted into power in 2016, Ranj Pillai, Minister of the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, received a mandate letter directing him to “promote responsible resource development balanced with environmental management and demonstrable benefits for Yukon by promoting oil and gas development outside the Whitehorse trough and without fracking.”

Brigitte Parker, a spokesperson for the Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, told The Narwhal in an email that Pillai’s letter continues to form the department’s mandate.

“Energy transitions take time and demand for oil and gas may continue into the foreseeable future,” she said.

Assessing the impacts of Eagle Plains drilling to Porcupine caribou

Chance first floated the idea of commercial oil and gas development in Eagle Plains in 2014, but a regional office of the Yukon assessment board determined that the company’s proposal to drill 20 new oil and gas wells could have significant adverse effects for the transboundary Porcupine caribou herd, one of North America’s last healthy caribou populations, which has come under increasing threat from oil and gas development in a thawing north.

According to an evaluation report conducted at the time, the impacts on the herd would have included habitat loss, injury and mortality.

The Chance project proposal area falls within the territory of Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, which is currently undertaking renewed analysis of how Chance’s current proposal could affect the herd.

Erika Tizya-Tramm, director of natural resources for Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, told The Narwhal the Vuntut Gwitchin and Yukon governments “are working together to determine both the state of the herd and what those possible impacts could be and what the implications are” in response to Chance’s proposal. Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, Tr’ondek Hwech’in, Inuvialuit and other nations harvest the Porcupine caribou for subsistence.

In its maintenance proposal, Chance noted it would only be able to carry out its work in the winter months, when the ground and snow conditions would be conducive to heavy trucks and machinery moving around on access roads. But the winter months are when the Porcupine caribou are most likely to be nearby. 

Chance said if more than a dozen caribou are observed from the project area, or if caribou show up and hang around for more than three days, then the company will engage a qualified environmental professional to determine if site-specific mitigation measures are needed.

That plan struck members of the public and even Environment and Climate Change Canada as insufficient. 

In response to Chance’s application, the federal department requested the company “describe the site specific mitigation measures that would be implemented in response to observations of more than a dozen caribou or caribou remaining in place for greater than three days.” 

Environment Canada also noted Chance should describe the specific measures it would take should caribou show up. 

The Yukon Environmental and Socio-Economic Assessment Board also wants to see more from Chance when it comes to assessing and planning for impacts to the herd. In April the board sent 21 specific questions to Chance, including a request for more information about the scientific foundation of the company’s plans.

Among other things, the board says it isn’t clear why Chance chose the threshold of more than a dozen caribou, or the need to establish mitigation plans if caribou linger for more than three days. 

“It is not clear why these numbers have been chosen as thresholds or the conditions and triggers that would result in the need for site-specific or tailored management measures,” the board wrote to Chance.

Amelie Morin, manager of the board’s Dawson designated office, said numerous public comments have noted concerns about impacts to Porcupine caribou. 

“We have seen comments through our seeking views and information period that identified potential impacts to Porcupine caribou and linking that to proposed activities … we’re certainly aware of that and will consider that in the evaluation,” Morin told The Narwhal. 

Tizya-Tramm said there is a lot more work to be done when it comes to understanding how Eagle Plains oil and gas development could impact the herd and to ground mitigation plans for Chance in stronger analysis.

“We’re working to produce more materials around caribou, including safe operating distances and determining significant numbers of caribou that would trigger oil and gas development work to stop or continue.”

In its proposal to the board, Chance did not clarify how its project proposal was informed by engagement with the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation or identify how the nation would be involved in cleanup activities should an accident or spill take place, according to the First Nation’s submitted comments.

“We need to be at the table every step of the way,” Tizya-Tramm said.

Waste injection, flaring at Eagle Plains also a concern

Before full-scale development can even be considered in Eagle Plains, Chance would have to submit a formal application to receive permits for that level of development. 

Wyman said in the meantime, Chance needs to conduct this currently proposed work to determine if there are, in fact, resources available in the basin. 

“There is no certainty that all this work will happen,” Wyman told The Narwhal. “The actual amount of drilling and seismic data acquisition will depend on results as the program unfolds.”

“At this time, we do not have specific locations where we will drill or where we will gather more seismic data.”

“The idea would be to get some more information about well capabilities, reservoir performance and help provide more insight as to what a development might look like with those wells,” he said. 

To get that information, Chance hopes to perform extended flow testing, an activity that involves measuring volumes of natural gas and any associated liquids, such as propane, that may be produced from specific wells. 

“All of this is relevant for designing development plans and engaging potential purchasers of natural gas and any associated liquids,” Wyman said.

He said the wells would be returned to a suspended state following the tests.

According to the company’s project, the tests would involve flaring for roughly six weeks. Flaring is used to dispose of any natural gas that may be produced during testing.

Jones said flaring would cause “considerable disturbance” for wildlife in the area.

“When you burn the gas off, it doesn’t just vanish,” he said. “There are byproducts from burning — carbon dioxide is obviously one of them. There are going to be fallouts of soot and chemicals and stuff like that onto the land around there. It’s also pretty noisy, it’s also pretty hot, it’s also pretty bright.”

Wyman said flaring stacks would be tall to mitigate potential environmental impacts. “The risk of doing anything untoward to the surface should be pretty limited,” he said.

Chance’s proposal also identified another opportunity to use some of the wells for waste disposal. 

Two wells in particular “represent opportunities for deep zone injections,” Wyman said.

Injection wells, which are used primarily to dispose of certain fluids, including propane and waste water, are not readily available in Yukon.

“Rather than taking fluids 2,000 kilometres to a disposal site in British Columbia, which has its own environmental risks, we’d just dispose of them locally,” Wyman said, noting he wants to see the wells already drilled in Eagle Plains put to good use for local communities, either now or in the future.

“This [proposed] project is to protect assets that are viable for future use,” he said.

Wyman said any future exploration work would be done intentionally to be smaller in scale and span a longer period of time, “partly to minimize environmental impacts, but also to help develop local capacity to participate.”

The exploration program has been presented on “several occasions” to affected First Nations, including Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and the Gwich’in Tribal Council, he said.

But many wonder if extended flow testing or flaring ought to be permitted under the auspices of a well maintenance proposal. 

When asked if flow testing is considered an aspect of well maintenance, Morin from the Dawson designated office told The Narwhal, “I can tell you extended flow testing is an exploration activity. It’s related to exploration. It’s not related to the maintenance activities.” 

Chance Oil and Gas was unable to respond to all of the board’s requests for additional information by its May 10 deadline. The company indicated it would answer those questions within a one-year timeframe.

Chance has until Feb. 22, 2022, to provide responses to the board’s questions. 

— With files from Julien Gignac

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

This story was made possible by funding through the Local Journalism Initiative.

An election campaign is well underway in Yukon, and the outcome at the polls on April 12 could have serious impacts for the environment in the territory.

The election follows multiple political shake-ups in Yukon: Kate White’s ascension to leadership of the Yukon NDP following the retirement of long-time party leader Liz Hanson; Mayo-Tatchun representative Don Hutton’s abrupt defection from the Yukon Liberals to run as an independent; and the decision by the Green Party — which did not win a single seat in the territory in the last two elections — to field no candidates for the first time in more than a decade. 

The election also comes at a time of serious upheaval for the territory; although Yukoners have been spared many of the more serious realities of the COVID-19 pandemic seen in other parts of the country, travel bans and mandatory quarantines have left the local tourism industry reeling.

More broadly, the territory is grappling with the challenge of balancing First Nations rights and land use with the interests of business and development. Over the past month, two First Nations have launched lawsuits against the government over land use planning issues in their traditional territories.  

To get a better sense of what’s at stake, The Narwhal reached out to the three parties — Yukon Party leader Currie Dixon, Yukon NDP leader Kate White and the Liberal Party’s John Streicker, who served as minister of community services in the incumbent Liberal government — to see where they stand on three fundamental Yukon environmental issues: land use planning, clean energy development and climate change.

In advance of Yukon’s April 12 election, The Narwhal spoke to NDP Party leader Kate White, Yukon Party leader Currie Dixon and former minister of community services for the incumbent Liberal Party, John Streicker. Photo: Yukon Assembly and Currie Dixon. Graphic: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Where the parties stand on Yukon’s hot-button issue: land use planning

Land use planning is an area of constant friction among proponents of resource extraction, First Nations and conservationists.

Under Yukon’s unique agreement with First Nations, the territory is obligated to create land use plans that determine which lands are set aside for protection and which areas will remain open to industry, road building and other forms of development.

Previous missteps with land use plans have landed the Yukon government in hot water. The land use planning for the Peel watershed, for example, precipitated a 15-year legal battle that wound up in Canada’s Supreme Court, where judges ruled the government failed to adequately consult First Nations when deciding how much of the region would be open to industrial development. 

Yukoners are watching the process unfold in the Dawson region, where the government has allowed mineral staking to continue before certain ecologically sensitive areas can be set aside for protection. 

This could incentivize would-be miners and developers to snap up stakes in areas that would likely be protected under the future plan. Such claims can be grandfathered into land use plans, Sebastian Jones, wildlife and habitat analyst for the Yukon Conservation Society, told The Narwhal. That’s something the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation and the First Nation of Na-Cho Nyäk Dun have already objected to in the Antimony Creek area near Tombstone Territorial Park. 

Dixon acknowledges that land use planning in the Peel is something the Yukon Party, which was in power in the territory from 2002 to 2016, “did not get right.” 

A timeline of Yukon government since the territory became independent after 1975. Illustration: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Recent land use challenges and lawsuits by First Nations stem from decisions made by the Liberal government, which in 2016 campaigned on strong government-to-government relations and consultation with First Nation. 

In a recent post on the Yukon Liberal Party’s website, incumbent Premier Sandy Silver made an explicit commitment to pursue “respectful, strong partnerships with First Nations.” The party’s 2021 platform outlines plans to increase regulatory clarity for mineral developers while also “recognizing the importance of land use planning.”

Streicker said recent controversy over land use plans is not for the Liberal Party’s lack of effort or success, although he admitted there have been a few “kinks” in the process. 

“If you were to look back over time and say, ‘Have we worked hard at working respectfully with First Nation governments?’ I think, yes, it’s one of our biggest achievements,” Streicker said. “Does it mean that we haven’t had tension and missteps along the way? No. But I really do believe there has been a significant shift on that front.” 

If re-elected, the Liberals intend to continue with the Dawson land use plan. Prior to the start of the election campaign, the government withdrew some areas in the Dawson from mineral staking and the Liberals have committed to further withdrawals once planning is completed. 

“It’s a commitment in our platform to do more land use planning broadly … we’re going to invest heavily in land use planning for the territory,” Streicker said.  

For the Yukon NDP, land use planning and resource development must have the “free, prior and informed consent,” of Indigenous Peoples, as outlined by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), White said.

“UNDRIP isn’t just a document — it’s a commitment and it has to change our relationships, how we behave, from a government-to-government basis,” she said.

“And — this is an important note — I, as the colonial government, can’t say (for a First Nation) what consent is.”

The Yukon NDP’s 2021 election platform states that land use plans are the “basis for sustainable development in the Yukon” and commits to “protecting at least 50 per cent of the Yukon’s land and waters in partnership with First Nations and the Inuvialuit through land use planning and other available measures.”

White says the party also intends to make “strong commitments” to protect wetlands in the territory, bringing “industrial use” — meaning resource extraction projects like mining — to a “zero” in these areas.

The Ogilvie mountains spread out in the Peel watershed where 67,431 square kilometres of ecologically sensitive land are protected under a land use plan. Photo: Peter Mather

Dixon, who was voted in as Yukon Party leader in May 2020, said although his party has “a pretty strong record when it comes to the implementation of land claims and setting up of new protected areas throughout the territory,” it needs to do a better job of working with Yukon First Nations, particularly at the government-to-government level.

The Yukon Party’s 2021 election platform mentions an explicit promise to complete the Dawson land use planning process only in a section devoted to the party’s commitment to mining. However, the platform also includes numerous commitments to advancing the interests and economic opportunities of First Nations in the spirit of reconciliation.

“I think now as we go forward with land use planning throughout the territory, we — all Yukon, government, First Nations and others — all have a much better sense of what the process is supposed to look like, and how we all need to engage it,” Dixon said. “I think, having learned those lessons, and having had that experience, we will be well positioned to move ahead in a much more collaborative and effective way.”

Reducing Yukon’s reliance on fossil fuels

The lion’s share of energy needs in Yukon is met through hydroelectricity developed in Whitehorse.

But when demand exceeds capacity — a common occurrence during winter months, when electric heating and increased indoor time strain the power grid, or when water levels are low — the grid is supplemented with power from fossil fuels. So energy may be coming from fossil fuels even when homes are heated with electricity or people choose to drive electric cars.

The power grid also remains “islanded,” Streicker said, meaning it is not connected to other, larger networks in Alaska or British Columbia. Additionally, many Yukon communities outside of Whitehorse remain off the main grid, relying on imported, heavily polluting diesel for power.

Read more: How can Canada’s North get off diesel?

Yukon spends about $60 million every year on heating, with $50 million going to fossil fuels imports that are driving up the territory’s greenhouse gas emissions. Heating currently accounts for one-quarter of the territory’s overall emissions and makes up one-half of the Yukon government’s emissions.

So what do each of the three parties propose?

Dixon, from the Yukon Party, said the best solution is to clean up the territory’s backup energy sources.

“The reality of an isolated grid is that fossil fuels will continue to be a part of our grid for the foreseeable future, we’ll always need that backup power, but the goal for us should be to reduce our reliance on that as greatly as possible.”

“Our vision going forward is to add significant renewable energy projects to … the grid,” he said, adding that his party would encourage renewable initiatives for homeowners and small businesses through financial incentives.

“There’s ways to add renewable projects to the grid … whether it’s through the microgeneration policy or the independent power producer policy. Those are both policies that we introduced in our last term in government and ones that our platform will contemplate enhancing and expanding over the course of the next few years,” he said.

The Yukon Party’s platform notes that, if elected, the party will explore the creation of a LNG (liquified natural gas) energy facility in Whitehorse, the development of hydrogen and the option of expanding the Yukon grid to B.C.

The Yukon NDP, meanwhile, would consider expanding the territory’s limited hydro grid. White said Yukon has created a false narrative around diversified energy sources, giving Yukoners the choice between diesel fuel and LNG, without offering large scale renewable projects as an alternative. 

“If we look at our diesel communities, we need to be doing everything we can to support them to cut down on that diesel until we have the ability and enough (renewable) generation to be able to get transmission lines out,” she said. White also noted there are newer and better technologies for renewable power storage and building strategies the territory could exploit to make green power generation more efficient. 

In its platform, the NDP pledges an “out-right ban” on all fracking and “non-renewable energy extraction” in the territory. The party also says it will investigate a territory-wide energy grid, legally mandate energy efficiency in buildings and immediately fund research for thermal heating, geothermal development, small-scale hydro projects, pumped storage, wind, solar and the use of biofuels. 

Read more: Yukon’s climate plans rely on biomass. But is it actually good for the environment?

Streicker said the Liberal Party’s goal is for renewables to generate 97 per cent of the territory’s power and to connect communities not currently on the grid, such as Beaver Creek and Watson Lake. The Liberals support bringing in renewable energy from the Taku River Tlingt’s hydroelectric project near Atlin, B.C., which would involve upgrading transmission lines from Jake’s Corners to Whitehorse or Carcross.

The proposed Moon Lake pumped storage project, which would see renewable energy held in reserve, is “the ideal,” for the Liberals, Streicker added. 

“With respect to reducing our fossil fuels, we absolutely have to shift the energy economy,” Streicker said. The Liberal’s platform also lists commitments to investigate the use of geothermal for both electricity and heat, construct a biomass plant, invest in renewable energy projects in partnership with First Nations and support solar and other micro-energy projects.

A mother fox and her kits out and about in Whitehorse, Yukon, where the species is a now-common sight. As the temperature has risen in the North, red foxes are now able to survive and thrive where they couldn’t before. Photo: Peter Mather

Climate change and Yukon’s biggest emitters

Like much of the North, the Yukon is experiencing the effects of climate change, including thawing permafrost and changes in precipitation, more severely and faster than the rest of the country.

“If you’re asking if we need to reduce our greenhouse emissions or adapt to climate change (in Yukon), it’s not an ‘or’ question, it’s an ‘and’ question,” Streicker said.

Both White and Streicker noted the toll that transportation — cars, trucks, planes — takes on the territory’s emissions and both parties want to “electrify” the Alaska Highway, creating electric vehicle stations so people can use electric cars to move back and forth between communities. Both parties identified transportation as a major issue for the territory in terms of carbon emissions, with Streicker adding that “more than half” the territory’s emissions are generated from transportation alone.

Yukon is a small emitter compared to other provinces, but the territory’s emissions are on the rise. According to the Yukon government’s most recent data, emissions grew by 11.8 per cent between 2009 and 2017, the most recent year for which data is available. Emissions from transportation grew by 14 per cent during the same period.

The Yukon Liberal’s climate plan, Our Clean Future, cited an emissions reduction goal of 30 per cent by 2030. The party’s platform doubles down on the plan, and includes proposed rebates for electric vehicles and bikes and more charging stations. The platform also supports development of climate adaptation, green home building plans, the promotion of sustainable tourism and wildfire prevention.

But White said the Liberal’s climate plan doesn’t go far enough because it doesn’t address emissions from the territory’s mines. Mining is the single-largest private contributor to the territory’s economy.

“I have concerns that the Our Clean Future plan does not include mining in its reduction target and I’m concerned (the target) is too low,” she said. 

The NDP would like the target increased to a 45 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 and would like to see mining emissions included in the calculations, she said. The NDP platform also pledges to require Yukon mines to meet absolute emissions reductions standards, not intensity targets.”

The Liberal’s Our Climate Plan proposes establishing intensity-based targets for mines in 2022.

Read more: Will mining be the sleeping giant of Yukon greenhouse gas emissions?

According to Roxanne Stasyszyn from Yukon’s Department of Environment, mining emissions make up 10 to 15 per cent of the territory’s total emissions on average, although they fluctuate from year to year depending on the amount of mining activity taking place.

Emissions from mining are calculated based on how much fuel is purchased for mining activities, which is tracked through fuel tax exemption permits and includes fuel used onsite at mines, but not fuel used to transport materials, equipment, or people to and from mine sites. Those activities are captured under other emissions categories such as road transportation and aviation. Mining emissions are tracked separately from other emissions because the variability of the industry makes setting limits for emissions difficult, Stasyszyn told The Narwhal.

Mines connected to the grid, like the Victoria Gold Eagle Gold mine, near Mayo, produce relatively few emissions. However, off-grid mines can be very large emitters if they’re powered by fossil fuels. 

Newmont’s Coffee Gold project, near Dawson City, will use diesel power to produce about 19 million kilowatt hours of energy annually — enough electricity to power about 1,360 Yukon homes for one year. The mine is expected to produce about one million tonnes of carbon dioxide over its 12-year lifespan. The off-grid Kudz Ze Kayah mine is anticipated to produce roughly 110,000 tonnes of emissions over 10 years.

Location of many mining projects, in operation or proposed, in Yukon, including the off-grid Kudz Ze Kayah mine in the southeastern portion of the territory. Map: Carol Linnitt / The Narwhal

Streicker said significant drops in mining sector emissions — which can happen when a mine closes — have been treated in the past by Yukon Party governments as though large climate commitments have been met, which is, in part, why the Liberal Party counts mining emissions separately.

While the Yukon Party is committed to supporting the mining industry, Dixon also noted that  nature is important to “a lot of Yukoners,” saying his party wants to ensure the environment is protected while also balancing economic interests and jobs.

“I want to see a healthy and sustainable mining industry here in the territory, and I want to make sure that we continue to promote the territory as an attractive place to invest in mining opportunities, but also to create opportunities for local citizens,” Dixon said. 

He said the party will be taking “significant action against climate change and ensuring we do our part to address this challenge as part of a Canadian effort and a global effort.”

“We want to see some action taken to address climate change, and we recognize that it’s a significant challenge for all of us.”

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.