The Jarvis Lakes showing is located approximately 93 kilometres north of McBride and 167 kilometres east-northeast of Prince George, on the north-facing slope of a mountain north of Jarvis Lakes. The showing is 15 kilometres west of the British Columbia–Alberta border, in the Liard Mining Division.
The region is underlain by an assemblage of sedimentary rocks that were deposited in a continental shelf environment along the western margin of Ancestral North America. This clastic and carbonate rock sequence ranges in age from Hadrynian to Upper Cretaceous and now lies within the Foreland tectonostratigraphic division of the Canadian Cordillera. Folds and southwest-dipping, northeast-directed thrust faults are the dominant structures of the region.
The Jarvis Lakes showing is hosted within the Mississippian Rundle Group, which is characterized by limestones, marbles and various calcareous sedimentary rocks. It is located within 1 kilometre of the contact with the Upper Devonian to Lower Mississippian Banff and Exshaw formations, which are characterized by limestones, slates, siltstones and argillites, and within 1.5 kilometres of the Upper Devonian Palliser Formation.
Locally, massive sulphide mineralization, apparently stratiform in nature, was formed in fine-grained quartz arenites of the Permian Mowitch Formation. Mineralization consisted of 1- to 3-centimetre thick pyritic beds or lenses that assayed up to 0.719 per cent zinc (Fieldwork 1991, page 80).