Quartzite is produced from two quarries, 1.6 kilometres apart, along the road that follows the north side of Crawford Creek, east of Kootenay Lake. The western quarry is located 5.5 kilometres north-northeast of the north end of Crawford Bay, 100 metres east of Preacher Creek.

This area, on the north side of Crawford Creek, is underlain by Lower Paleozoic metasediments of the Lardeau and Hamill groups and the Badshot and Mohican formations, which are locally warped into a series of northerly trending folds. The two quarries are developed in quartzite of the Lower Cambrian Hamill Group, comprised of some 3500 metres of quartzite, schist and meta-siltstone. Two varieties of stone are quarried; a pale, translucent beige quartzite and a darker brown quartzite.

The quarries have been operated since 1966 by International Marble and Stone Ltd. The company trucks the quartzite to its processing plant at Sirdar where it is crushed and screened to produce construction aggregate for architectural, decorative and landscaping purposes. Some of the stone is oxidized by roasting to produce pink and reddish material (D. Gunning, personal communica- tion, 1991).