Agay Mene Territorial Park

Next time you’re driving to Atlin, take in the beauty of the Agay Mene area. Starting near Jake’s Corner, the 719-square kilometre of landscape stretches all the way to the British Columbia-Yukon border.

The area is rich in biodiversity including Moose, a small population of Mountain Goat, a suite of rare plant species, large and small mammals, birds, and a diverse community of insects and other invertebrates. Older White Spruce forests are present in a couple of small pockets but much of the area was burned in 1958, so Lodgepole Pine is now the dominant tree.

The geological history of the park is a fascinating one. The dramatic features of the park are a product of repeated glaciation of the region by the northern Cordilleran Ice Sheet over the last 2.6 million years. These glaciations sculpted the broad and deep valleys and rounded the peaks of the region. Many of the complex lake systems of the area including Snafu and Tarfu lakes are "kettle lakes" which formed through the melting of buried glacial ice at the end of the last glaciation approximately 12,000 years ago.

On the north side of the park is Mount White, which is made of limestone reef formed approximately 300 million years ago in a warm shallow ocean near the equator. This region was carried northward due to movement of tectonic plates and became part of the Cordilleran mountain range, which developed over 160 million years ago along the western margin of North America.

Agay Mene is intended to become a territorial park per Chapter 10 of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation Final Agreement. Park management planning is currently on hold. Once planning resumes, it will be led by a steering committee, which will include representatives from the Government of Yukon and First Nations governments.