What we are hunting
The Great Canadian Treasure Hunt
Thirteen chests hidden across Canada, 289 one-ounce gold coins, a thirteen-stanza poem, and seventeen months to read it correctly. This is the hunt the Society's open file is about.
What it is
In August 2025 The Northern Miner and EarthLabs opened a national armchair treasure hunt built around Canada's mining history. Thirteen physical chests were hidden across the provinces and territories. Each contains a unique alphanumeric code; the code, not the box, is what you claim.
The prize pool is 289 one-ounce gold coins, struck from gold out of Agnico Eagle's Detour Lake Mine. The grand prize is 217 of them — roughly a million dollars. The remaining twelve chests are monthly bonus prizes of six coins each, around twenty-eight thousand dollars a piece.
The master clue is a thirteen-stanza poem, published at the opening. Additional hints have been released monthly since, through The Northern Miner, MINING.COM, CEO.CA and the other EarthLabs channels.
It runs until 31 December 2026. Open to Canadian residents eighteen and over. No purchase required.
The rules that matter in the field
The organisers were specific about placement, and the specifics do real work in narrowing a search:
- Every chest is on publicly accessible land, reachable on foot.
- Nothing is buried. No shovel, no rope, no scuba gear.
- No private property, no caves, nothing underwater, no buildings, no cemeteries.
- Each site sits at least five kilometres from any organiser's own property.
Which is to say: if your reading of a stanza puts a chest down a shaft, under a lake, or on somebody's back forty, your reading of the stanza is wrong. This has already saved the Society one weekend and cost it another.
The Society's position
Our open file reads The Poem as encoding a route rather than a single location, with at least one waypoint in the Temagami corridor. We have walked that corridor once. It does not go where the 1971 aerial photography suggests it goes.
The working notes are not published — see Article X. What we have published is the survey method and a full account of getting it wrong at Cobalt, which is more useful to you than our guesses are.
Dispatch log
-
Standing position Note
Confidence on the primary corridor: 45%. Five months and one day remain. The Society is not optimistic and is going anyway.
-
Fifth bonus treasure released — southern British Columbia Bonus chest
Fifth bonus chest released in southern BC. The Society notes, without further comment, that five of the first releases have been west of Ontario.
-
Temagami corridor walked Dispatch
Three days of reconnaissance on a corridor that reads well on paper and badly on the ground. Survey published; the working file stays closed while this hunt is live.
-
First bonus treasure recovered — Dawson City, YT Bonus chest
The first of the twelve monthly bonus chests is found in Dawson City. Six coins. The Society was not close, was not in the Yukon, and had not seriously considered it.
-
File opened: The Northern Miner Hunt Note
Investigation opened. Initial reading treats The Poem as encoding a route rather than a single location — a position we have not yet had reason to abandon.
-
The hunt opens Clue
The Northern Miner and EarthLabs open the Great Canadian Treasure Hunt. Thirteen chests, 289 one-ounce gold coins struck from Agnico Eagle's Detour Lake Mine, and a thirteen-stanza poem. The Society files its first working notes the same evening.
The Procyon Society is not affiliated with The Northern Miner, EarthLabs, or Agnico Eagle. Details above are summarised from the published rules and are current as of 13 Sep 2026. Verify against the official source before you drive anywhere.