What is the Yukon River?

The Yukon River is a major North Pacific river that originates at Llewellyn Glacier in northwestern British Columbia, flows through Yukon and central Alaska, and reaches the Bering Sea on the Alaska coast. The river is 3,190 kilometres long, the fourth-longest river in North America after the Mississippi-Missouri, the Mackenzie, and the Rio Grande. About 1,150 kilometres of the river are in Yukon, with the rest in Alaska and British Columbia.

The Yukon River drains a basin of about 854,000 square kilometres, covering most of Yukon and a large portion of central and western Alaska. Major tributaries include the Tatshenshini, the Stewart, the Pelly, the Tanana, the Porcupine, the White, and the Klondike Rivers. The river is wide and braided through much of its course, with extensive sand and gravel bars and slow-moving channels. The Yukon River freezes from October to May along most of its length and ice break-up in spring is celebrated in many communities.

The Yukon River was central to the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896 to 1899. Prospectors travelled by boat from St. Michael on the Bering Sea up the river to Dawson City at the mouth of the Klondike River, a journey of about 2,100 kilometres. Stern-wheel paddle steamers operated on the Yukon from 1869 to 1955, with the MV Klondike (now preserved as a National Historic Site in Whitehorse) the largest river boat to operate on the Yukon. The Klondike's discovery on August 16, 1896 by George Carmack, Skookum Jim Mason, and Tagish Charlie at Bonanza Creek (then called Rabbit Creek) brought tens of thousands of miners north.

The Yukon River basin is the homeland of many Indigenous nations including the Tagish, Tlingit, Tutchone (Northern and Southern), Tr'ondek Hwech'in, Vuntut Gwitchin, Han, Gwich'in, and several Athabaskan-speaking nations in Alaska. The river supports Pacific salmon (chinook, chum, and coho) that migrate thousands of kilometres upstream to spawn. Salmon stocks have declined significantly in recent years; the 2021 Yukon River chinook return was the lowest on record, prompting subsistence and commercial fishery closures. The Tr'ondek-Klondike historic landscape including Dawson City and the Tr'ondek Hwech'in settlement and ancestral hunting and fishing sites was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site on September 19, 2023, the first UNESCO designation in Yukon.