The IQ prospect is on the east side of Trout Lake, 8.0 kilometres north of the community of Gerrard. It straddles the highway between Stobart and Rady Creek. The IQ claim was staked for N. Tribe and Associates Limited in 2002. The company has mapped and prospected the area as a potential source of both flagstone and building stone. The Trout Lake area is underlain by a thick succession of sedimentary and volcanic rocks of the Badshot Formation and Lardeau Group near the northern end of the Kootenay arc, an arcuate, north to northwest trending belt of Paleozoic and Mesozoic strata that is now classified as a distinct, pericratonic, terrane. The arc rocks are bordered by Precambrian quartzite in the east and they young to the west, where they are bounded by Jurassic-age intrusive complexes. They were deformed during the Antler orogeny in Devonian-Mississippian time and were refolded and faulted during the Columbian orogeny, in the Middle Jurassic. A large panel, the "Selkirk allochthon", was later offset to the northeast by dip-slip motion along the Columbia River Fault.

The Badshot Formation is composed of a thick Cambrian limestone that is a distinctive marker horizon in the Trout Lake area. It is underlain by Hamill Group quartzite and it is overlain by a younger assemblage of limestone, calcareous, graphitic and siliceous argillite and siltstone, sandstone, quartzite and conglomerate, and also mafic volcanic flows, tuffs and breccias, all of which belong to the Lardeau Group. The rocks are isoclinally folded and intensely deformed, but only weakly metamorphosed. They occur as intercalated beds of marble, quartzite and grey, green and black phyllite and schist. Fyles and Eastwood (EMPR BULL 45) subdivided the group into six formations (Index, Triune, Ajax, Sharon Creek, Jowett and Broadview) of which the lowermost (Index) and uppermost (Broadview) are the most widespread. The Triune (siliceous argillite), Ajax (quartzite) and Sharon Creek (siliceous argillite) are restricted to the Trout Lake area. The Jowett is a mafic volcanic unit.

The IQ claim is underlain by deformed, northwest trending and steeply dipping, metasedimentary rocks of the Broadview Formaton. The rocks are fissile and weakly schistose and cut by a northwest trending fault that divides the tenure into two principal lithologies. The southwest part is underlain by white meta-quartzite and the northeast part by quartz-sericite schist. The former contains approximately 1.0 per cent and the latter nearer 2.0 per cent sericite. The rocks are readily split into 1.0 to 5.0 centimetre thick slabs and the sericite provides a silvery luster to tabular surfaces.