Yukon or Yukon Territory or (usually) The Yukon is one of Canada’s northern territories, in the country’s extreme northwest. It has a population of about 31,000, and its capital is Whitehorse, with a population of 23,272. People from Yukon are known as Yukoners.
Whitehorse
Whitehorse is a Canadian city, the territorial capital of the Yukon. Its population is 23,205 (Yukon Bureau of Statistics Dec 2004).
Whitehorse is at kilometre 1489 of the Alaska Highway and is the terminus of the White Pass and Yukon Route Railway from Skagway, Alaska. At the head of navigation on the Yukon River, the city was an important supply and stage center during the Klondike Gold Rush. It has been the territorial capital since 1952, when the seat was moved from Dawson City after the construction of the Klondike Highway.
The city gets its name from the Whitehorse rapids, which were said to look like the mane of a white horse. The rapids have disappeared under Schwatka Lake behind a hydroelectric dam, which was completed in 1957.
Nowadays Whitehorse is a government town, with excellent facilities for visitors and locals to enjoy. It is the home of the main campus of Yukon College. A $45 million (CAN) Multiplex centre is being built for the Canada Winter Games in 2007. Whitehorse also previously hosted the 1972, 1980, 1986, 1992 and 2000 Arctic Winter Games.
Yukon Geography
The very sparsely populated territory abounds with natural scenic beauty, with snowmelt lakes and perennial whitecapped mountains. Although the climate is arctic and subarctic and very dry, with long cold winters, the long sunshine hours in short summer allow hardy crops and vegetables, along with a profusion of flowers and fruit to blossom.
The territory is the approximate shape of a right triangle, bordering the American state of Alaska to the west, the Northwest Territories to the east and British Columbia to the south. Its northern coast is on the Beaufort Sea. Its ragged eastern boundary mostly follows the watershed between the Yukon Basin and the Mackenzie River watershed to the east in the Mackenzie mountains.
Canada’s highest point, Mount Logan (5959 m), is found in the territory’s southwest. Mount Logan and a large part of the Yukon’s southwest are in Kluane National Park and Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Other National Parks include Ivvavik National Park and Vuntut National Park in the north.
Most of the territory is in the watershed of its namesake, the Yukon River. The southern Yukon is dotted with a large number of large, long and narrow glacier-fed alpine lakes, most of which flow into the Yukon River system. The larger lakes include Teslin Lake, Atlin Lake, Tagish Lake, Marsh Lake, Lake Laberge, Kusawa Lake, and Kluane Lake. Lake Bennett, B.C., on the Klondike Gold Rush trail is a smaller lake flowing into Tagish Lake.