The Yukon’s most important joint venture

If you think you know the story about Shawn Ryan, the prospector behind White Gold, you don’t know the half of it.

The Yukon’s biggest find since gold was discovered in the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1800s has turned the territory on its ear, creating an unprecedented rush on claims and turning Ryan into something of a poster boy for the new era of discovery. Ryan recently received the Bill Dennis Award for success in prospecting by the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC), after receiving similar recognition by the B.C. and Yukon mineral exploration sectors. And not long ago, he launched Ryan Gold Corp., a gold exploration company in the Yukon that will aid Ryan in using his innovative and game-changing soil program on the roughly 35,000 claims he owns—approximately 20 per cent of the active claims in the territory.

Mining & Exploration featured Ryan almost two years ago (Riding Tall in the Golden Saddle, Fall/Winter 2009), just as the world was discovering the man who discovered White Gold.

But while Ryan may be getting all the press, he is the first to point out that his wife and business partner, Cathy Wood, is the mainframe of their operation.

Beside every great man

“Over the course of our working relationship, she’s the one I would have to present my budget, my ideas, to,” said Ryan. “She was the board of directors, if you want to call it that, where I would come up and say, ‘I have new idea and what do you think?’ “

Ryan met his future partner in all things when he was running a morel mushroom operation. Then, as now, Ryan used a methodical approach, cross-referencing collected data to determine where the money crop would be. However, approaching Wood was pure instinct.

“In ’92, we met on a street corner of the old visitor’s centre (in Whitehorse),” recalled Wood. “At that point, that’s where you went for job postings and those sorts of things . . . He was coming out of the visitor’s centre and I was sitting there. I thought, ‘He’s going to come back and talk to me.’ And sure enough, he turned around and came back.”

Ryan hired Wood as part of his morel operation, and the two quickly became inseparable. They shared a love of being outdoors and unconventional living. They worked side by each for five years, and when Wood became pregnant with their first child, Cheyenne, Ryan began to consider another career path—prospecting.

Ryan admits that he was pretty green when he entered the field, and the two relied heavily on grants from the Yukon Mining Incentive Program while Wood took on odd jobs to get by. They moved into a 34-square-metre cabin in Dawson City with no electricity, telephone or indoor plumbing. They often lived hand to mouth, making sacrifices so that Ryan could travel to remote locations to follow a hunch. Ryan said there was never any hesitation on Wood’s side.

“We lived there for six years, but I convinced her at the beginning that this would only be a two-year stint,” said Ryan. “We should be able to make some good money at this game. It looks like everything is starting to rev up. And I told her a good story is selling, so I could sell these good ideas from the Yukon—and then the Bre-X scandal hit within a month and a half, and there went the idea of a good story selling.”

For those six years, both Ryan and Wood learned about the industry. Ryan started to refine his soil sampling program that is now changing the prospecting field, and Wood learned the business side of it. When the little cabin became too small for the growing family—son Callum was born a few years later—Wood found an owner-financed piece of land with two small cabins that they were able to link together while Ryan was out in the bush.

The birth of a gold rush

Around this time, when Wood was heavily pregnant with Cheyenne, Ryan started sniffing around an area on the White River, 185 kilometres by boat from Dawson City.

“I was trying to get my last few rocks of the season,” said Ryan, “and at one point we came down the channel and we got high and dry in the middle of the river. And she looks back at me and says, ‘What do we do now?’ And I say, ‘I hate to tell you this, dear, but you’re going to have to get out and push.’ She was looking at me like, ‘If I have my baby here, you’re in big trouble.’ ”

While there are no emergency birth tales in this story, another prospect was gestating. The area Ryan was prospecting in would be one he would return to several times, and where his soil sampling program would bear fruit. Ryan had found some interesting anomalies that indicated a trail leading to a quartz vein float. The rock was assayed and the results showed gold was present at roughly 59 grams per tonne. That discovery, on the site now known as White Gold, changed everything.

Both White Gold and Ryan became hot properties, especially when surrounding claims such as the Coffee began to pan out. But Ryan continued to defer to Wood in business matters, even as he was being wooed by investors.

“She would basically talk to the different clients, the prospective clients,” said Ryan. “She would actually go and flush them out for me. I would stay home and watch the kids and she would go to the Cambridge House and roll around the floors, talking to different companies and scoping out who is the management, who is on the board of directors, what their track record is . . . We realized once we got going that there were a lot of deals to be had, but we wanted to be with the right crowd.”

Perfect partners

Ryan freely admitted that he uses Wood as an out when he is pressured to make a decision, saying that hiring, budgeting and signing on the dotted line falls squarely in her “committee.”

“And they’d say, ‘What are we supposed to do—fly up there to Dawson?’ ” laughed Ryan. “And I’d say, ‘Yup—and you better bring a nice bottle of wine.’ ”

Wood said that they fell by their delegation of duties naturally—she had prior financial experience and a good business head. But it’s more than that.

“Part of it is that it’s not a job,” said Wood. “He’s very passionate. He loves it and it’s fun for him, so he’s 150 per cent focused—that allows him to do extremely well in that end.”

The marriage and the business partnership are based on a strong foundation of mutual respect and admiration. Ryan said that without Wood’s support and willingness to rough it in a tiny cabin for six years, the White Gold’s story might be someone else’s to tell—or might not be told at all.

“This is my take—anyone who has been in this business for a decade or more and has been through a downturn or more, the only reason they’re in this business is because of their spouse,” said Ryan. “Those are the unsung heroes of our business—we’re a bunch of kids. The analogy I say is that all of the geologists, all the people who are playing in the bush—we’re basically like a bunch of eight-year-olds looking for Easter eggs. And we’re allowed to do this because this is our job, but the only way we’re able to do this is if your spouses or partners put up with this.”

As always, the last word goes to the wife.

“I always knew, whatever way it worked out, I was OK,” said Wood. “But he was the one that followed his passion and I never doubted him. If there was something to find, he was the one who was going to find it.”