Winning the NextGen Prospect Challenge was a big deal in itself for Ryan Burke, a young geologist just out of university in 2020. The unique Dragons’ Den-style contest — held in Toronto at the world’s largest mining conference — had students and recent graduates pitching ideas for greenfield mines to mining CEOs. The winner claimed a $17,000 prize, connections with industry insiders and the chance to further pursue their dream proposal.

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But within two years, Burke had done much better.

Barely launched on his career, the Whitehorse native inked a deal in 2022 with one of the sponsors of the event to develop what could be a rich deposit of gold, silver and copper he found in the Yukon mountains.

The option agreement pays Burke, 29, an upfront $150,000 and one million shares in Transition Metals Corp., currently trading for about 6.5 cents on the TSX Venture Exchange, over four years, while committing the Sudbury, Ont.-based company to spend $1 million to develop the site.

More tantalizing is what will come his way if Transition beats some fairly steep odds and one day establishes a mine at the property. Burke would receive a $1.5-million “milestone” payment when production starts and a one-per-cent royalty on what the mine extracts — potentially worth many millions of dollars.

“It’s an unscratched lotto ticket is what it is. But it’s an educated lottery ticket,” Burke said while at another isolated mining camp in the Yukon. “The odds are extremely stacked against you. The normal is to fail. But if you do actually find something significant, the payoff is huge. It could be life changing. That’s definitely a big intrigue.”

Burke seems almost as excited about the journey that got him to the deal: chopper rides out to the Yukon wilderness, extended hikes, encounters with grizzly bears and finding samples that hint at something lucrative hiding below ground.

To go into the field, carry out a lot of prospecting work and have a discovery merely optioned is “a very rewarding experience,” he said.

Transition’s chief executive Scott McLean said geology is a fairly “creative” science when it comes to finding mineral deposits. He said he got involved in the NextGen Prospect Challenge because he wanted to tap into the kind of human resource Burke represents.

“At that age, you’re full of energy,” he said. “You come out of university thinking you’re the smartest guy on the planet. And you’re so engaged in what you’ve just done, the ideas are just kind of flowing.”

It’s an unscratched lotto ticket is what it is. But it’s an educated lottery ticket

Ryan Burke

Transition on July 24 announced it was starting a new phase of exploration at the 3,700-hectare Pike Warden site, about 65 kilometres south of Whitehorse. That includes two types of remote sensing — hyperspectral imaging and light detection and ranging (LIDAR) — that document mineral formations from above.

Nevertheless, the large majority of properties discovered by prospectors never comes to fruition, whether because early signs of pay dirt fail to pan out, extracting the mineral is too costly or the price of the commodity makes mining it uneconomical.

McLean said Pike Warden, while “highly interesting,” requires a lot more work to determine if it has the makings of a viable mine. Even if the results are stellar and the project is fast-tracked, it would still take at least eight to 10 years to get a facility up and running.

That world of risk and reward is in Burke’s blood. His father is a geologist who worked for the Yukon Geological Survey, acting as a sort of liaison between government and industry.

Growing up, Burke said he was particularly captivated by the mining community’s cast of colourful characters and prospectors who would weave romantic stories of their adventures in the back country. They include Shawn Ryan, who lived for years with his wife in a tin shack on the outskirts of Dawson City, before discovering the nearby Coffee gold deposit, which is expected to produce as much as 184,000 ounces of gold a year.

Burke had just finished his geology degree at Memorial University of Newfoundland when he returned to the Yukon in 2019 and decided to explore an area that had shown promise when a mine operated nearby in the 1980s, but had been all but forgotten since.

The area centred around a caldera — an ancient, collapsed volcanic crater — set amidst picturesque mountains.

Accessing a grant from the Yukon government and using his own funds, he and university pal Charlie Pike hired a helicopter to take them to a spot 15 kilometres from the nearest road. They set up camp, then hiked 130 kilometres over nine days.

“We just covered as much ground as we could,” Burke said. “Up mountains, down mountains, across mountains. It was pretty extensive.”

The samples they collected showed enough promise to win the challenge in 2020, held at the annual Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) conference. Helped by the prize money, he returned for more exploration the next two summers, and finally signed the agreement with Transition.

Remarkably, that was not the young geologist’s only discovery. He made another find — gold and copper mineralization — elsewhere in the Yukon and signed a similar option deal with Cascadia Minerals Ltd., which recently began trading on the TSX-V, and is now busy exploring the Catch property.

In the process, Burke began to amass some of his own tales of the prospecting life.

He and his friend once heard “crazy … thunderously loud” crashing from above as they climbed a steep slope and were convinced a rockslide was about to land on top of them, only to realize it was cascading down the mountain’s other side. There was the grizzly bear that “came over a hill” while they were hiking, and on another occasion, they spied a grizzly in a valley, staring — perhaps hungrily — at a lone caribou in the distance.

Then there was the time two mountain-sheep hunters suddenly popped up at their remote camp, located kilometres from the nearest road, and much further from any human settlement.

The challenge event was started by geologist Jamal Amin and colleagues as part of their non-profit Next Gen Geo, an effort to help young professionals break into the mining industry. He’s seeking sponsors now for a new edition of the contest next March.

It’s becoming increasingly important to usher fresh talent into the business, as many of today’s mining geologists are at or near retirement age, Amin said from a project site in Nunavut.

Still, he said, even some professionals in their 70s are reluctant to give up the kind of adventure that enchanted Burke, and the chance to strike it rich with a discovery that goes all the way.

“It’s a sort of addictive thing,” Amin said. “Going to these wild places where you see amazing things, meet amazing people … and it’s pretty spectacular when you pull something out of the ground and it’s shiny and full of minerals.”