The Split Rock bentonite occurrence is located on the eastern side of the Deadman River, approximately 46 kilometres north west of Kamloops.

The bentonite occurrence was discovered during a regional industrial mineral assessment of the Tertiary rocks in southern British Columbia by Peter Read (Fieldwork 1987). In 1994, Western Industrial Clay Products staked the Sic claims to cover the showing and performed geological investigations and sampling by means of drilling thirty 1.25-metre deep postholes with a gas-powered auger. In 1995, another thirty 1.25-metre auger sampling program was completed.

The Sic claims lie near the base of the Eocene Kamloops Group which forms a moderate northeasterly dipping sequence of aphanitic dacite to andesite ash tuff which is now dominantly montmorillonite. Outcrops of rare, unaltered andesite flows and dikes up to a few metres in thickness are present in the bentonite-rich ash tuff outcrops. Two bentonite lenses up to a hundred metres thick and at least 500 metres long forms within the ash tuff. A layer up to a metre thick composed of weathered bentonite "popcorn" covers the bentonite outcrops making it difficult to obtain unaltered samples of the bedrock.