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Abandoned mines › Alaska
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Anchorage Municipality, Alaska

Anchorage Municipality, Alaska has 348 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1951–1994, including 6 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 1 prospect pits; 7 of the features carry a name on the map. MSHA's register carries 29 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Anchorage Municipality, every OSMRE abandoned mine land problem in the county, and every MSHA-registered mine here with status Abandoned. Named features are listed below; unnamed ones are counted by type. Locations are deliberately not shown: this page says what abandoned workings are in the county, not where to find them. They are dangerous and should not be entered.

Mapped mine features (USGS)
348
Mine openings
6
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
29
7 features carry a name1 prospect pits23 quadrangle maps, published 1951–1994 0 MSHA mines abandoned and sealed
What the features are
  1. Mine openings
    shafts, adits, air shafts, portals and vertical openings: the ways into underground workings
    6 1.7%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    1 0.3%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    10 2.9%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    173 49.7%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    158 45.4%
Named features on the maps7 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Bahrenberg Mine Adit
Brenner Mine Mine Shaft
Crow Creek Mine Mine
Gridwood Mine Open Pit Mine
Jewel Mine Adit
Monarch Mine Mine
Portage Mine Open Pit Mine

A name is the label printed beside the symbol on the map. "First mapped" is the earliest topographic edition that shows the symbol, which bounds the feature's age from above; it is not the date it was worked. Unnamed features (most prospect pits, adits and shafts carry no label) are in the counts above but not this list.

MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned29 on register
  1. AAP Rock Crusher
    Surface metal/non-metal · Alaska Aggregate Products, LLC. · MSHA ID 5001841
    Abandoned
  2. Alaska Railroad Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Damco Paving Corp · MSHA ID 5000348
    Abandoned
  3. ARCTEC Alaska Portable # 1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Arctec Alaska JV · MSHA ID 5001687
    Abandoned
  4. Birchwood Facility
    Surface metal/non-metal · Granite Construction Company · MSHA ID 5001927
    Abandoned
  5. Birchwood Loading Station
    Surface metal/non-metal · Anchorage Sand & Gravel Company Inc · MSHA ID 5000689
    Abandoned
  6. Bristol Portable Plant #1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Bristol Construction Services LLC · MSHA ID 5001859
    Abandoned
  7. Cedarapids Model JP2236 Port. Jaw Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · GMC Contracting, Inc. · MSHA ID 5001885
    Abandoned
  8. Chugiak Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Wilder Construction Company · MSHA ID 5001302
    Abandoned
  9. Clemro Jaw Crusher
    Surface metal/non-metal · Alaska Interstate Construction, LLC. · MSHA ID 5001877
    Abandoned
  10. CPP Portable Crusher 1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Granite Construction Company · MSHA ID 5001832
    Abandoned
  11. Crusher # 2
    Surface metal/non-metal · McKenna Brothers Paving Inc · MSHA ID 5002116
    Abandoned
  12. Eastwind Portable Crusher
    Surface metal/non-metal · Eastwind-Div/Norcon Inc · MSHA ID 5001528
    Abandoned
  13. Fitz Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Mike Fitzgibbon/Jeremy Drahosh · MSHA ID 5001721
    Abandoned
  14. Hamilton Portable
    Surface metal/non-metal · Hamilton Construction · MSHA ID 5001654
    Abandoned
  15. Klondike Pit And Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Klondike-Alaska Inc · MSHA ID 5000442
    Abandoned
  16. Knik Gravel Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Knik Management, LLC · MSHA ID 5001794
    Abandoned
  17. Knoll Quarry (Portable Plant)
    Surface metal/non-metal · B. West Construction Company, Inc. · MSHA ID 5001762
    Abandoned
  18. Nuvuk Crusher # 65010
    Surface metal/non-metal · Nuvuk Construction LLC · MSHA ID 5001735
    Abandoned
  19. Pioneer Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · O'Malley Sales/Luther Trust J V · MSHA ID 5001322
    Abandoned
  20. Plant No. 1 Chieftain 1400
    Surface metal/non-metal · Bureau Of Indian Affairs · MSHA ID 5001724
    Abandoned
  21. Plant No. 2 Tesab Rotocrusher
    Surface metal/non-metal · Bureau Of Indian Affairs · MSHA ID 5001725
    Abandoned
  22. Plant No. 3 Pegson Metro Trac
    Surface metal/non-metal · Bureau Of Indian Affairs · MSHA ID 5001726
    Abandoned
  23. Plant No. 4 Mark II Power Screen
    Surface metal/non-metal · Bureau Of Indian Affairs · MSHA ID 5001727
    Abandoned
  24. Portage Gravel
    Surface metal/non-metal · Conrad Contracting · MSHA ID 5001799
    Abandoned
  25. Powerscreen
    Surface metal/non-metal · Kiewit Infrastructure West Co · MSHA ID 5001899
    Abandoned
  26. Rock Alaska Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Kiewit Manson, a JV · MSHA ID 5001807
    Abandoned
  27. Rock Products Portable Crusher
    Surface metal/non-metal · Rock Products Inc · MSHA ID 5001530
    Abandoned
  28. Skookum Rock Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Hamilton Construction, LLC · MSHA ID 5001856
    Abandoned
  29. West Dowling Road Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Granite Construction Company · MSHA ID 5001317
    Abandoned

Status and date are as reported to MSHA by the operator. Each mine's own page carries its accident, citation and inspection record.

By source vocabularythe publishers' own terms
Feature type Features
Tailings - Placer 157
Gravel Pit 84
Gravel Pit 81
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 6
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 5
Adit 4
Mine 2
Open Pit Mine 2
Mine Shaft 2
Borrow Pit 1
Tailings - Undifferentiated 1
Open Pit Mine 1
Prospect Pit 1
Quarry 1
Other counties in AlaskaAll counties →
How to read these numbers

A USGS feature is a symbol on a historical topographic map, there when the map was surveyed; it may since have been sealed, reclaimed, built over or reopened as a working mine, and the map does not say which. An OSMRE row is a problem the abandoned mine land program tracks, not a mine. An MSHA mine is a registered operation whose operator reported abandonment, a record that starts in the 1970s. The three overlap and are never added together. The county is assigned from each feature's coordinates against the Census 2023 county boundaries. The full method is on the national page.

Sources
  1. USGS, Consolidated Prospect- and Mine-Related Features from 7.5- and 15-Minute Topographic Quadrangle Maps of the United States (USMIN)
    597,612 point and area features digitized from about 106,350 historical topographic maps published 1886–2006; public domain (CC0). A feature is a map symbol, not a field-verified site, and the map does not say whether it was still worked.
  2. USGS Fact Sheet 2025–3003, The Abandoned Mine Inventory of the United States
    States that as of 2025 there is no comprehensive national inventory of abandoned mine features, and that the detailed national database now being built will not be published.
  3. OSMRE, Abandoned Mine Land Inventory System (e-AMLIS), public Problems layer
    One row per abandoned mine land problem in a problem area, with its type, funding program and reclamation status; mostly coal mined before the 1977 Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act. Coordinates are the problem area's.
  4. MSHA, Mines dataset (Mine Data Retrieval System)
    Every mine registered with MSHA since the 1970s; a mine reads Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed when its operator reported that status. Refreshed weekly.
  5. US Census Bureau, 2023 cartographic county boundaries (1:500,000)
    Each feature's county is assigned by its coordinates against these boundaries, not copied from the source file.
  6. GAO-20-238, Abandoned Hardrock Mines (March 2020)
    Federal agencies had identified at least 140,000 abandoned hardrock mine features on federal land and estimated more than 390,000 more not yet captured in their databases.
  7. Abandoned Hardrock Mine Reclamation (AHMR) Program, US Department of the Interior
    The program the USGS inventory is compiled for. Its appropriations and the 674,000 field-confirmed feature count on this page were provided by the program manager, Office of Environmental Policy and Compliance, and are cited with permission (2026-09-08).
  8. IMCC-NAAMLP Hardrock AML Report
    Page 48 carries the two figures this page leans on: USGS estimates 633,181 of the 725,690 mine features it recorded from historic topographic maps, 87 percent, are hardrock; and state and federal agencies have submitted more than 724,000 AML features to the national database being built, already more than the historic maps hold. Year-by-year AHMR funding is on page 35.