The Tic skarn is located approximately 11.5 kilometres southeast of Newmont Lake.
The area is underlain by a steeply dipping, deformed package of andesitic ash and lapilli tuffs, bedded tuffaceous sediments and thin marble beds. These are locally epidotized and silicified and are intruded by numerous sills and dikes of hornblende plagioclase-porphyritic quartz diorite and granodiorite. Locally, the intrusions contain elongate screens of the host tuffs.
The skarn is developed along the southeast margin of a steeply dipping and northeast-striking marble unit, 70 to 100 metres thick. The coarse-grained, recrystallized marble is strongly foliated and contains thin, deformed silty layers and pods of pink, crystalline calcite. A zone of massive magnetite, 5 to 7 metres wide, lies along the contact between the marble to the northwest and tuffs and mafic quartz diorite to the southeast. The contact between the magnetite zone and the marble is generally sharp but locally it is marked by either a 1 metre zone of orange-coloured ankeritic alteration or irregular pods of coarse crystalline pyrite up to 15 centimetres in diameter. Deformed pods of pyrite up to 30 centimetres wide, and thin pyrite veins, occur within the magnetite unit and the adjacent marble. Locally, the magnetite also contains some carbonate clots and small, euhedral quartz crystals.
A nearby sill of mafic hornblende quartz diorite is moderately to extensively altered to endoskarn; it contains widespread epidote, local pockets rich in brown-coloured garnet, and veins of pyrite and potassium feldspar. Farther from the skarn, the intrusions tend to be fresher. Local silification and epidote-carbonate-pyrite alteration occurs in both the intrusions and country rocks up to 400 metres south and southwest of the Tic skarn, though no additional magnetite-rich skarn was seen. In places, the rocks are overprinted by narrow, southeast-trending, fracture-controlled zones of orange to brown-coloured ankeritic alteration. At one locality, southwest of the skarn, the altered tuffs are also cut by thin veins (less than 2 centimetres) that contain calcite, epidote and coarse, black tourmaline; X-ray diffraction analysis indicates the latter is dravite (M. Chowdry, personal communication, 1990).
Two mineralized grab samples assayed up to 0.98 per cent arsenic, 0.31 per cent copper, 2.9 grams per tonne gold, 1.6 grams per tonne silver, 0.0078 per cent antimony and 0.0083 per cent selenium (Ray and Webster, unpublished data).
In 1988, Kestrel Resources collected a sample from a massive pyrite zone that measured 1 by 30 metres and assayed 2.6 grams per tonne gold and 15.9 grams per tonne silver (Assessment Report 18451). This zone occurs between limestone and a chloritic intrusion.
In 1988 Kestrel Resources Ltd collected a total of 172 rock samples and 11 silt samples on the Tic 7-9 claims. Kestrel followed up in 1990 by collecting a further 86 rock samples.
In 2018 Cameo Cobalt Corporation conducted an airborne magnetic survey over their Big Mac West and Big Mac East properties. A total of 511.4 line-kilometres were flown over the Big Mac East, and a total of 201.4 line-kilometres were flown over the the Big Mac West during the 2018 field program. Twenty-seven rock samples were taken from the Big Mac West Property which contains two MINFILE occurrence, Tic 8 (104B 367) and Forrest 13 (104B 493). The Big Mac East property also contains two MINFILE occurreces, Bell 6 (104B 483) and Kelly (104B 482).
Fifteen of the 27 samples were taken in the vicinity of the Tic 8 showing. Significant values here were from samples associated with the magnetite-skarn zone and include 0.19 per cent, 0.33 per cent and 0.35 per cent copper; sample B0003461 silicified andesite from the same area assayed and 0.18 per cent copper and 1.32 grams per tonne gold (Assessment Reported 38293).
