Yukon who is who

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Ole A. “Anker” Hoidahl (1899 – 1962.)
	
Anker Hoidahl was born in Oslo 1899 and came to Canada about 1927. He prospected in the Dawson area before he was involved in the 1947 rush to the Firth River country. Pat Callison remembers flying him to a place near the Arctic coast. He stayed in the area after that and made his headquarters in Aklavik. He could have been a wealthy man if he had exploited some of the property he had an interest in, but he preferred to prospect, map the country, and record the bird and animal life he saw. The //Whitehorse Star// newspaper called him one of the north’s greatest prospectors.((“Prospector dead in crash.” //Whitehorse Star// (Whitehorse), 18 August 1962.))
	
Hoidahl hand trenched a property on a tributary of the Bell River, 150 miles east of Old Crow in 1951-52. He staked the property as the Lone Eagle and Bluebird groups in December 1952. New York Alaska Dredging Corp took in a bulldozer in 1952 and built an airstrip. The Hoifahl occurrence was restaked in 1970 but the area was withdrawn from staking in 1978 pending the creation of a National Wilderness Park.((Yukon Geological Survey, 2020 website:  http://data.geology.gov.yk.ca/Occurrence/14930#InfoTab.)) In 1961, Hoidahl discovered gold placers on two small creeks draining the northwest flank of Mt. Sedgwick into the Crow River. The site is a hard rock occurrence named “Tulugaq.”((Yukon Geological Survey, 2020 website:  http://data.geology.gov.yk.ca/Occurrence/14937#InfoTab.)) 
	
Hoidahl was killed in a plane accident in 1962 when a light plane, a Howard DGA-15P, crashed at the northwest outlet of Arctic Lake in the headwaters of the Arctic Red River. Pilot Allan Boles and prospector James D. Harris survived the crash. All three were living in Inuvik at the time. The plane lost power on take-off during severe turbulence and struck the ground in a gorge leading away from the lake. The power loss was due to an interruption of fuel flow and improper fuel tank selection was a contributing factor in the crash.((Yukon Government, Yukon Air Crash Inventory database, YACSI # 1962-09.))
	
Hoidahl Mountain in the Blow River area, and Hoidahl Dome in the Selwyn Mountains are named for him. Anker Hoidahl is listed in the Yukon Prospectors Association Hall of Fame.