This group, consisting of the Comstock (Lot 1027), Virginia (Lot 1028), and Erie (Lot 1029) Crown-granted claims, is situated near the head of Long Creek. Workings, which are on the Comstock, consist of 3 short adits, 23 metres apart vertically. The middle adit, at elevation 2110 metres, is the only one on which work has been done in recent years. This adit, 56 metres in length follows a quartz vein, up to 0.6 metre in width, and wherever the vein widened small stopes about 3 metres in length were taken out. Such stopes occur at distances of 6.7 metres, 17.6 and 30.7 metres from the portal.
No work had been done on this group since 1908, when in 1948 Mrs. Barbara Gilkev and R.C. Gilkev, who originally bought the claims at a tax sale, interested J. Armes of Vancouver in the claims. Four men were employed on the property during part of the summer, and the portal of the middle adit was reopened. There is no record of any subsequent development, and in November the claims once more reverted to the Crown.
Regionally, the area lies on the western margin of the Kootenay Arc, in allochthonous rocks of the Quesnel Terrane. In the vicinity of the occurrence, the Quesnel Terrane is dominated by the Upper Triassic Slocan Group, a thick sequence of deformed and metamorphosed shale, argillite, siltstone, quartzite and minor limestone. Rocks of the Slocan Group are tightly and disharmonically folded. Early minor folds are tight to isoclinal with moderate east plunging, southeast inclined axial planes and younger folds are open, southwest plunging with subhorizontal axial planes. The sedimentary sequence has been regionally metamorphosed to lower greenschist facies.
The Slocan Group has been intruded by the Middle Jurassic Nelson intrusions which comprise at least six texturally and compositionally distinct phases ranging from diorite to lamprophyre. The most dominant phase is a medium to coarse grained potassium feldspar porphyritic granite (Paper 1989-5).
The Comstock-Virginia occurrence consists of a quartz vein located within a northeast trending fault zone in the porphyritic granite phase of the Nelson intrusions. The vein dips steeply northwest and varies from a few centimetres to 0.75 metre in width. It consists mainly of white quartz which cements fragments of the wallrock and is mineralized with galena, sphalerite, tetrahedrite, pyrite, pyrargyrite and argentite. The vein walls are well defined and marked by a narrow gouge seam.
The vein has been exposed in three adits 23 metres apart vertically. The middle adit was rehabilitated for a distance of 55 metres in 1980. A grab sample taken from the middle adit assayed 9052 grams per tonne silver, 28.9 per cent lead and 29.1 per cent zinc (Property File - Ash, W.M., 1988).
In 1909, 5 tonnes of ore were mined from the property to produce 15,552 grams of silver and 2722 kilograms of lead.
