Description

The Yukon and Canadian Governments and White River First Nation agreed to create a 530.30 km2 Special Management Area designated as a Habitat Protection Area that cover Wellesley Lake and the surrounding wetlands. It is currently proposed that Selkirk First Nation will add this SMA to their Final Agreement. The Habitat Protection Area designation does not require the withdrawal of the area from mineral staking and withdrawal has not been requested in the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the Governments of Canada and Yukon and the First Nations. The purpose of this report is to present the results of the detailed mineral assessment of an approximately 1094 km2 area that encompassed the proposed Special Management Area. This enlarged area was included to provide some relative context for the assessment. The proposed area has no known mineral occurrences and although it was not the focus of the 2002 fieldwork, work conducted during 2002 did not identify any new mineral resources. The detailed mineral assessment is based on the mineral potential of the geology as identified by a panel of industry experts. The detailed mineral assessment map indicates that a belt of rocks crossing the northwestern portion of the proposed Special Management Area has the highest relative mineral potential. This area is underlain by Windy McKinley Terrane (WMT). The WMT is composed of an oceanic assemblage of ultramafic rocks, greenstone, chert, carbonate, and metamorphosed equivalents. The WMT was determined to have the highest relative mineral potential by the assessment panel conducting the detailed mineral assessment of the Wellesley study area. The assessment panel determined that the WMT has potential for hosting volcanic massive sulfide volcanogenic type, gabbroic nickel-copper and gold-quartz vein deposits. The Carmacks volcanic rocks in the southern portion of the proposed Special Management Area have potential for epithermal type deposits. Field work in 2002 located an area with anomalous gold, arsenic and antimony values in soil and stream sediment samples in the WMT just outside the proposed SMA boundary. Two soil samples collected from within the proposed SMA, from an area underlain by Carmacks Group basalts, yielded weakly anomalous gold values. Further evaluation work is recommended for the higher elevations where there is potential for rock formations to outcrop.

Resources

Name	Format	Description	Link
Report	HTML		https://data.geology.gov.yk.ca/reference/42378
Report	Unknown		https://data.geology.gov.yk.ca/reference/42378
Report	HTML		https://data.geology.gov.yk.ca/reference/42378
Original metadata (https://open.yukon.ca)	HTML		https://open.yukon.ca/data/datasets/report-detailed-mineral-assessment-proposed-wellesley-lake-special-management-area
Original metadata (https://open.yukon.ca)	HTML		https://open.yukon.ca/data/datasets/report-detailed-mineral-assessment-proposed-wellesley-lake-special-management-area
Original metadata (https://open.yukon.ca)	HTML		https://open.yukon.ca/data/datasets/report-detailed-mineral-assessment-proposed-wellesley-lake-special-management-area

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