The Silver Belt is situated near the head of Springs Creek on the ridge between Springs and Bruce creeks, at 2400 metres elevation above sea level, 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 Silver Belt deposit is within the upper dolomite member of the Mount Nelson Formation, immediately below the Windermere unconformity (Assessment Report 9842). The host dolomite is light grey and fine grained with abundant black chert layers which preferentially replace cryptalgal structures and thin carbonaceous black shale interbeds. The strata are folded in northwest-trending anticlines and synclines which vary from isoclinal to more open, broader folds. The occurrence consists of two shallow shafts excavated in an area of limonitic dolomite near the contact with the overlying sandstone of the Toby Formation. Within limonitic dolomite, galena and sphalerite mineralization occurs in quartz veinlets 1 to 10 millimetres in width.
Sporadic production from the occurrence between 1901 and 1918 yielded 148,735 grams of silver and 17,950 kilograms of lead from 98 tonnes mined.