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Shawn Ryan is a Canadian prospector, miner, and mushroom-hunter who sparked the "second Yukon gold rush" in Northern Canada.

Career
Ryan was raised in Timmins, Ontario. While in high school, he worked for a local hunter after he was caught poaching small carnivores from one of the hunter's trap lines. . In 1989, Ryan moved from Ontario to the Yukon Territory, where he found work as a mushroom-hunter in Dawson as the industry was growing in the region. During his early years in Dawson, Ryan and his wife, Cathy Wood, lived in a tin shack on the outskirts of town that lacked electricity or running water. They moved into a cabin on the grid in the early 2000s. Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, Ryan alternated between morel-hunting and gold prospecting as his primary source of income, refining his soil data and using government-issued geological information to pinpoint sites with potential for either mushroom-picking or prospecting. These methods bore fruit for the first time in 2001, when Ryan sold the "Lucky Joe" claim to a mining junior, which in turn sold the claim to mining company Kennecott, which bought the claim based on the soil sampling Ryan and geologist Ricardo Presnell had done within the claims. Ryan's career picked up again in 2005, when he and geologist Mike Burke discovered the White Gold deposit on the banks of the White River. The discovery of this claim, which had been sought after since the late 1980s, netted Ryan millions and led to a partnership between Ryan, Wood, Presnell, mining junior executive Rob McLeod, and Australian scientist Adrian Fleming, who led mining junior Underworld Resources. As Underworld Resources was beginning to grow from the discovery of the first White Gold lode, Kinross Gold launched a takeover, buying the company for $140 million. Although the partnership between the five was intended to continue through a different company, Presnell's death while skiing in December 2009 put a temporary end to such plans.

Personal Life
Ryan met his wife in Whitehorse in the spring of 1992. She was a former bank employee who had traveled to Whitehorse by motorcycle after quitting her job. They have two children, Cheyenne and Callum.

Ryan's best friend, Antoine Deschenes, died on February 22, 2001, while searching for gold at the bottom of the Yukon River. Ryan had been asked by Deschenes to come with him, but had chosen not to go.