The Kootenay Queen prospect is located at an elevation of 1980 metres in a small cirque on the south side of Delphine Creek in the Golden Mining Division.

Regionally, the area is underlain by Proterozoic clastic sedimentary rocks of the Purcell and Windermere supergroups and by lower Paleozoic strata of the Beaverfoot and Mount Forster formations (Geoscience Map 1995-1).

The Purcell Supergroup strata include the Aldridge, Creston, Kitchener, Dutch Creek and Mount Nelson formations. The Windermere Supergroup unconformably overlies the Purcell Supergroup rocks and includes the Toby Formation and Horsethief Creek Group (Paper 1990-1).

In the vicinity of the occurrence, rocks of the Kitchener and Dutch Creek formations have been further subdivided and assigned to the Van Creek and Gateway formations. The Van Creek Formation correlates with the Lower Kitchener Formation while the Gateway Formation is equivalent to the lower portion of the Dutch Creek Formation. The Mount Nelson Formation has been subdivided into seven discrete members, a lower quartzite, a lower dolomite, a middle dolomite, a purple dolomite, an upper middle dolomite, an upper quartzite, and an upper dolomite (Open File 1990-26).

Rocks of the Horsethief Creek Group, Beaverfoot and Mount Forster formations are folded and overthrusted by rocks of the upper portion of the Dutch Creek Formation and the lower members of the Mount Nelson Formation. The sedimentary rocks have undergone regional metamorphism to at least greenschist facies.

The occurrence consists of a small adit driven for a distance of 43 metres along a 30 centimetre wide quartz vein. The vein is hosted in cream to buff dolomite of the upper dolomite member of the Mount Nelson Formation immediately below the Windermere unconformity (Open File 1990-26).

The main ore minerals are galena, tetrahedrite and sphalerite. Analyses of pure galena yielded 2400 grams per tonne silver and 65 per cent lead (Minister of Mines Annual Report 1915) and tetrahedrite contains 9 to 10 weight per cent silver (Open File 1990-26). The ore displays evidence of intense deformation and fine grained polygonal galena is common.