The Reno prospect is at 945 metres elevation on the south side of Hall Creek, above Duck Lake. It is approximately 1.5 kilometres east of the Duncan River.
The property was owned by E. Stevens, in 1929. At that time, it consisted of small open-cuts and an adit 30 metres long.
The Trout Lake area is underlain by a thick succession of sedimentary and volcanic rocks of the Badshot Formation and Lardeau Group near the northern end of the Kootenay arc, an arcuate, north to northwest trending belt of Paleozoic and Mesozoic strata that is now classified as a distinct, pericratonic, terrane. The arc rocks are bordered by Precambrian quartzite in the east and they young to the west, where they are bounded by Jurassic-age intrusive complexes. They were deformed during the Antler orogeny in Devonian-Mississippian time and were refolded and faulted during the Columbian orogeny, in the Middle Jurassic. A large panel, the "Selkirk allochthon", was later offset to the northeast by dip-slip motion along the Columbia River Fault.
The Badshot Formation is composed of a thick Cambrian limestone that is a distinctive marker horizon in the Trout Lake area. It is underlain by Hamill Group quartzite and it is overlain by a younger assemblage of limestone, calcareous, graphitic and siliceous argillite and siltstone, sandstone, quartzite and conglomerate, and also mafic volcanic flows, tuffs and breccias, all of which belong to the Lardeau Group. The rocks are isoclinally folded and intensely deformed, but only weakly metamorphosed.
The Reno area is underlain by brown-weathering quartzitic argillite of the Hamill Group which cut by irregular quartz-barite veins. The veins are enveloped by altered soft, grey schist. One is exposed in a series of open cuts over a length of 18.3 metres. The cuts show a 1.52 metres wide zone of rusty siliceous material that has a strike of approximately 145 degrees and an undefined dip. The rusty rock contains disseminated pyrite and a vein, up to 0.6 metres wide, of quartz and massive grey barite with fine-grained pyrite and small bunches of galena. The large open cut above the portal also shows barite, quartz, pyrite and galena irregularly distributed in small amounts over a width of 3.0 metres. In the adit, a body of quartz and barite is cut by a vein of pyrite up to 0.46 metre wide. The latter strikes due north and dips steeply west. The surrounding rocks are all intensely silicified. The Reno veins contain relatively small amounts of galena and were not considered a good prospect for lead and silver. Similarly, the pyrite was analyzed for gold but was found to be barren (GSC MEM 161).
