The Silver Tray prospect is poorly located but is "a few hundred feet" below the summit of the divide leading into Bonanza Basin" (EMPR AR 1927). It is most likely at approximately 2000 metres elevation at the head of American Creek. The workings are downslope from Butte [082KNW095] and Bonanza [082KNW112]. The tenures were owned by J. Parisian and Associates, in the mid-1920s. They drove a "few hundred feet of crosscut" and cut some deep trenches looking for the source of float.
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 Silver Tray area is most underlain by isolclinally folded phyllites and schists of the basal part of the Broadview Formation. The rocks are highly schistose. They display a pronounced northwest strike and moderate to steep dip to the northeast.
In 1927, J. Parisian cut some deep trenches through overburden and drove a tunnel a few "hundred feet" into "crushed argillaceous rock with quartz inclusions" looking for the source of detached masses of silver-lead ore found on surface. He failed to locate the source of the float.
