The DONOVAN CREEK placer occurrence is located south of Lightning Creek and the Barkerville Highway, approximately 16 kilometres west of the village of Wells.
Placer gold deposits of the Quesnel Highland region, including the former rich producers of the Barkerville camp, have accounted for a large proportion of British Columbia's alluvial gold production. With the exception of a few producers in the Wingdam area, which are underlain by Upper Triassic sediments correlative with the Nicola Group, almost all the deposits are underlain by the Upper Proterozoic to Lower Paleozoic Snowshoe Group. These predominantly metasedimentary rocks have been metamorphosed to greenschist facies.
Placer gold deposits in the region are generally found in relatively young Pleistocene gravels. The morphology and mineral associations of the gold suggests that it was derived locally, the most obvious sources are the numerous auriferous veins in the Downey succession of the Snowshoe Group.
Placer gold production on Donovan Creek has apparently been mainly from hydraulic mining gravel immediately above bedrock. The gravel is overlain by glacial silt and gravel. In one pit at least, the gold bearing gravels were reported to be 1.5 metres thick. The gold is coarse, worn and nuggety.
"Data from the Cariboo mining district indicate that supergene leaching of gold dispersed within massive sulphides by Tertiary deep weathering followed by Cenozoic erosion is the most likely explanation for the occurrence of coarse gold nuggets in Quaternary sediments" (Exploration in British Columbia 1989, page 147).
In 2013, Henning Gold Mines Inc. drilled 6 reverse circulation (RC) holes totaling 328.76 metres on their Lightning Creek property, including Donovan Creek. Drill locations resulted from an airborne electromagnetic survey and a 2D resistivity ground survey. The 50 drill samples processed indicated that the highest gold concentrations are restricted to the sequence of Sangamon interglacial cobble-rich fluvial gravel layers (Assessment Report 34963).
