Arctic Chief

60.661389°, -135.116995°

The Arctic Chief deposit was originally staked in 1899. Underground mining and intermittent production occurred between 1902-1907. Workings from this early phase of mining were later exposed during excavation of the West Pit in the late 1960s. Open pit mining in the form of steep-sided "open cuts" was conducted by New Imperial Mines between 1968-1969. Production totaled 217,662 tonnes of ore with an average copper grade of 1.44 wt. %. Arctic Chief was a small deposit yet it had the highest grades of copper of any deposits mined in the 1960s-1980s. Arctic Chief also had the richest gold grades in the Whitehorse Copper Belt!

The ore body is a contact deposit between limestone and intrusive igneous rocks (granite, granodiorite and diorite). The ore body is predominantly iron skarn, rich in magnetite and serpentine, with easy-to-find bornite and chalcopyrite as the primary ore minerals. Copper ore minerals are also visible in calc-silicate skarn, but with lesser abundance. There are late andesite dykes cutting through the pits that appear to be unrelated to the mineralizing event at Arctic Chief.

Click into the Kuula virtual trip below to explore the Arctic Chief mine site. Be sure to check out a number of videos in the East Pit examining late faulting and how it offsets the orebody, the andesitic dikes that crosscut mineralization, and the veneer of glacial till that overlies the orebody. In the West Pit there is impressive folding of the limestone host rock, plus a glimpse at (and in!) an adit from underground mining in the early 1900s.

Click anywhere on the site tour to launch it, then make sure to click the full-screen button in the top right corner to get the full experience. Once in the tour, click on individual sites to zoom in further and interact with the site.

If you are interested in engaging with the Arctic Chief site in a 3D environment, check out the digital terrain model with orthoimagery below. We encourage you to pop this out to a new tab to increase the size of the viewer and heighten this experience! Note that the size of the model is large and may take several minutes to load.