The Slate Creek placer occurrence is located along Slate Creek and encompasses all placer occurrences occurring along this drainage. The plotted location is centred on the remnants of a past placer operation operated by the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company (now Cominco) during the 1930s.

The Slate Creek Valley runs east-west from the settlement of Manson Creek to the Germansen River. The valley is V-shaped, widening to the west and opens into a swampy, wide and flat area. The valley is filled with glacial debris.

The bedrock consists of slates and argillites belonging to the Middle Triassic to Lower Jurassic Takla Group. The Manson fault zone lies approximately three kilometres to the northeast of the valley. A thrust fault runs through the valley.

Placer gold was first discovered on Slate Creek in 1871 with most of the early work attributed to small individual operations. These operations were mainly concerned with the bedrock benches bordering the stream. During the 1900s to the early 1920s, Kildare Mines Limited opened three pits which were between 9 and 18 metres deep using hydraulic methods. Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company held the ground between 1929 and 1943 and during this time operated a dragline-scraper plant which returned 164,290 grams of gold (Property File Rimfire Golden Rule Resources Ltd., 1981). These early placer mines where hampered by tightly-packed gravels above the bedrock. Since the 1940s, Slate Creek has been worked intermittently by individual workers. One operation, which is located approximately two kilometres west of the settlement of Manson Creek along the main road, has operated during the 1987, 1988 and 1989 field seasons and is believed to be still active. Lloyd Worthing ran a placer operation in 2002.

The auriferous gravels occur near the bedrock and overburden thickens to the west. The platy nature of the bedrock is believed to have a natural riffling effect, concentrating the gold in the cracks and crevices of the slates and argillites.

Past production varies from 100,340 grams as reported by Holland, 1950 (Bulletin 28, page 46) to 148,550 grams as reported by Armstrong, 1949 (Geological Survey of Canada, Memoir 252, page 148). According to Holland, almost all of the production came between 1931 and 1935.