Yukon is in the northwestern corner of Canada and is bordered by Alaska, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. The sparsely populated territory abounds with natural scenery, snowmelt lakes and perennial white-capped mountains, including many of Canada's highest mountains. The territory's climate is Arctic in territory north of Old Crow, subarctic in the region, between Whitehorse and Old Crow, and humid continental climate south of Whitehorse and in areas close to the British Columbia border. Most of the territory is boreal forest with tundra being the main vegetation zone only in the extreme north and at high elevations.
The territory is about the shape of a right triangle, bordering the American state of Alaska to the west, the Northwest Territories to the east and British Columbia to the south. Yukon covers 482,443 km2, of which 474,391 km2 is land and 8,052 km2 is water, making it the forty-first largest subnational entity in the world, and, among the fifty largest, the least populous.
Yukon is bounded on the south by the 60th parallel of latitude. Its northern coast is on the Beaufort Sea. Its western boundary is 141° west longitude. Its ragged eastern boundary mostly follows the divide between the Yukon River Basin and the Mackenzie River watershed to the east in the Mackenzie mountains.