Kelly Creek flows southward from the Vital Range into Byrnes Lake, approximately 32 kilometres northeast of Takla Landing. Placer gold was originally found at a point approximately 2.4 kilometres up from its outlet into Byrnes Lake in 1933, 64 years after gold was discovered on Vital Creek (093N 044), 7 kilometres to the northeast. Work was apparently carried out at the same time as that on Alice Creek (093N 048) to the southwest. Several old buildings and trails around this site have survived to today.
The creek drains an area underlain by a north-northwest striking, variably dipping sequence of interbedded phyllite, andesitic tuff and minor limestone assigned to the Carboniferous to Jurassic Cache Creek Complex. These rocks host numerous barren-looking, locally rusty, white quartz veins varying up to a metre in width.
The postglacial waters of the creek apparently cut down through glacial material masking the west side of the valley almost to bedrock, concentrating the gold and facilitating its extraction.
Production records for Kelly Creek are unavailable, but the creek is believed to have been worked up until 1940 and the gold was reported to be fairly coarse (Minister of Mines Annual Report 1933, page A107).
Arquerite, a natural amalgam of mercury and silver common in the area, was also reported to have been recovered from the creek.
In 1983 and 1984, Gold Porphyrite Ltd. completed exploration programs including prospecting; geological mapping and soil, lithogeochemical and heavy mineral sediment sampling. Significant geochemical anomalies were defined.
In 1985, Golden Porphyrite Ltd. conducted a geochemical survey on the Kelly Creek and Alice Creek areas. Although rock sampling returned insignificant values, two heavy sediment samples gave highly anomalous grades: Sample HS0105 graded 52 grams per tonne silver and 94 grams per tonne gold, and sample HS0207 graded greater than 200 grams per tonne gold and 44 grams per tonne silver (Assessment Report 14790).
In 1987, S.R. Ford, S.F. Coombes and David M. Nelles completed a heavy mineral stream sediment geochemical survey that defined several additional anomalies.
In 1996 and 1998, Rorex Exploration Inc. completed an exploration program to attempt to locate the hard rock sources of the heavy sediment anomalies. Soil sampling identified numerous multi-station gold anomalies, gold-copper coincident anomalies and copper-zinc coincident anomalies.
In 2011, Christopher O. Naas completed a small sampling and trenching program on the Kelly Creek area. Visible gold was observed with up to 3-millimetre grain sizes, with notable fine gold present (Assessment Report 32628).
