Our presentation reviews recent research to assess energetic budgets of juvenile salmonids in a mining impacted sub-arctic stream. Our study site is located at Coal Creek, a tributary of the Yukon River in Yukon-Charley Rivers National Park and Preserve in Alaska. This work is especially important in the context of the current collapse in Yukon River Chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha) populations. This collapse has had not only devastating effects on ecosystem health, but also an outsized impact on the local Indigenous people who rely on salmon for subsistence. In this research we demonstrate how mining-induced alterations to habitat impact growth potential for juvenile salmonids – principally by quantifying and characterizing macroinvertebrate prey communities and using this information, along with temperature to inform a growth model. Because salmon are limited in their access to prey by gape size it is critical that they grow rapidly to access larger, more energetically dense prey. We hypothesize that the impacted conditions in Coal Creek, principally redistribution of the stream into a novel channel dominated by mine tailings, is associated with slower growth rates in juvenile salmonids. Subsequently, we predict that total production of the macroinvertebrate community will be lower in Coal Creek than in adjacent, unmined reference streams, with concomitant impacts on salmonid growth rates between these streams.