The Hat property is situated near the head of Springs Creek on the ridge between Springs and Bruce creeks, at 2285 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 occurrence consists of a massive barite vein within a northwest-trending fault that offsets quartzite and conglomerate of the Horsethief Creek Group. The vein has been trenched for a distance of 20 metres along strike and 6 metres downdip. It has an average thickness of 2.4 metres and consists of pure barite with less than 0.1 per cent copper as tetrahedrite. Preliminary reserve calculations indicate a resource of 2700 tonnes of 92.4 per cent BaSO4 with a specific gravity of 4.37 (Assessment Report 6893).