Yukon Ice Patches

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The Yukon Ice Patches are many ice patches in the southern Yukon. They were found in 1997 and have kept hundreds of archaeological objects, some more than 9,000 years old. The first patch was found on Mount Thandlät, west of Kusawa Lake, about 60 km west of Whitehorse.

The Yukon Ice Patch Project began soon after, with archaeologists working together with six Yukon First Nations on whose land the patches sit: Carcross/Tagish First Nation, Kwanlin Dün First Nation, Ta’an Kwäch’än Council, Champagne and Aishihik First Nations, Kluane First Nation, and the Teslin Tlingit Council.

Ice patches are different from glaciers. Glaciers move downhill as they gain mass. Ice patches do not move; they form when snow is compressed into ice. If patches melt in warm summers, objects inside can stay preserved.

In the 1990s, during unusually warm summers, researchers started studying these patches. In September 1997, Gerald W. Kuzyk found the first artifacts on Thandlät at about 1,850 meters elevation, including a fragment of a throwing dart shaft.

Across the Kusawa Lake area, researchers recovered pieces such as a wooden dart shaft fragment dated to about 4,360 years ago, and a caribou dung pellet dated to about 2,450 years ago, from an ice core near the surface. These findings showed that ancient, non-glacial alpine ice could hold important paleobiological and archaeological information.

In total, 43 Yukon Ice Patches in the southern Yukon have yielded more than 207 archaeological objects and about 1,700 animal remains. The artifacts range from a 9,000-year-old dart shaft to a 19th-century musket ball. The findings also show three different techniques for making throwing darts, and that hunting technology remained stable for about seven millennia before the bow and arrow replaced it after about 1,200 years ago.

The artifacts are curated by the Yukon Archaeology Program, Government of Yukon. Local oral history adds context: for example, elder Mary Ned recalled caribou being common in the Kusawa Lake area, a memory supported by the discoveries and by stories of a caribou fence near the lake.