Hans Barchen (b. 1929)
	
Hans Barchen was born in Germany and came to Canada in 1953 when Germany brought in subscription. His first job was harvesting tobacco in Barrie, Ontario. He heard about jobs at Keno Hill on a streetcar and flew north. In 1959, he met a miner in a bar who wanted to sell his claim of a mile of good ground for $5,000. His partner also wanted to sell and that afternoon the three men set up a partnership called Bardusen Placers. Their first clean-up at the Johnson Creek mining claim was 375 ounces of gold. They bought a new cat but after that the recovery was not as good. The next year, Barchen married his childhood sweetheart, Regina, and brought her to the Yukon. She says he needed a cook. Gold was unpegged in 1970, and gold has risen steadily ever since 2000. When he started mining, cat operators earned $3.25 per hour and in 2006 they made $30.00 per hour. Diesel cost seven cents a gallon in the old days and in 2006 it was eighty-three cents a litre. Eventually, Barchen bought out his partners, but the claim was too poor to support his family of two boys, Claus and Ralph. In 1967, Barchen bought claims on Lightning Creek in Thunder Gulch and he and son Claus started mining there. They cleaned up the riffles one night in 2000 to find a 16-ounce nugget the size of an egg sliced sideways. The gold on the property is generally quite coarse. Ralph Barchen mined his own ground nearby. An unexpected find on their ground was a mastodon tusk, rare in the Mayo area. It was dated at 34,300 years old.((Anne Tempelman-Kluit, "Family nears a half-century of mining." //The Whitehorse Star// (Whitehorse), 3 March 2006.)) \\
	
The family-owned Bardusan Placers was still in operation in 2012 when owner-operator Claus Barchen received the Robert E. Leckie Award for excellence in environmental stewardship in placer mining.((Karen Kornelsen, “Bardusan Placers is a leader in environmental stewardship.” //Canadian Mining & Energy,// 14 December 2012.))