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Abandoned mines › Arizona
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Greenlee County, Arizona

Greenlee County, Arizona has 1,312 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1902–1997, including 579 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 653 prospect pits; 12 of the features carry a name on the map. MSHA's register carries 20 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Greenlee County, 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)
1,312
Mine openings
579
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
20
12 features carry a name653 prospect pits28 quadrangle maps, published 1902–1997 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
    579 44.1%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    653 49.8%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    11 0.8%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    48 3.7%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    21 1.6%
Named features on the maps12 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Ash Peak Mines Mine Shaft
Ash Peak Mines Mine Shaft
Campbell Blue Borrow Pit No 1 Borrow Pit
Coronado Mine Mine
Coronado Mine Mine Shaft
Crystal Cave Adit
Godfrey Mines Adit
Hannagan Gravel Pit Gravel Pit
Jail Cave Adit
Morenci Pit Open Pit Mine area
Shamrock Shaft Mine Shaft
Smuggler Mine Tailings - Undifferentiated area

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 Abandoned20 on register
  1. Ash Peak
    Underground metal/non-metal · Phelps Dodge Corp · MSHA ID 0202033
    Abandoned
  2. Ash Peak Mine
    Underground metal/non-metal · Arizona Flux Mines Inc · MSHA ID 0202336
    Abandoned
  3. Ash Peak Research & Development
    Surface metal/non-metal · Ash Peak Mining Company · MSHA ID 0202159
    Abandoned
  4. Compensation
    Underground metal/non-metal · Compensation Mining Partners · MSHA ID 0202339
    Abandoned
  5. Evans Point Lime Quarry & Aeriel Tram
    Surface metal/non-metal · Phelps Dodge Corp · MSHA ID 0200023
    Abandoned
  6. Metcalf Mine-Mill & Shops
    Surface metal/non-metal · Phelps Dodge Corp · MSHA ID 0200305
    Abandoned
  7. Mineral Park Crush and Screen
    Surface metal/non-metal · Ames Construction · MSHA ID 0203389
    Abandoned
  8. Oak Creek Materials LLC
    Surface metal/non-metal · Oak Creek Materials LLC · MSHA ID 0203266
    Abandoned
  9. Oak Creek Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Oak Creek Contracting Inc · MSHA ID 0202744
    Abandoned
  10. Oak Creek Sand & Gravel, Inc
    Surface metal/non-metal · Oak Creek Sand & Gravel, INC · MSHA ID 0203193
    Abandoned
  11. Phelphs Dodge Morenci, Inc.
    Surface metal/non-metal · Sierra Metals Inc. · MSHA ID 0203077
    Abandoned
  12. Polly Ann
    Underground metal/non-metal · Total Mine Services · MSHA ID 0202087
    Abandoned
  13. Portable Plant- Safford
    Surface metal/non-metal · Tri County Materials, Inc · MSHA ID 0202588
    Abandoned
  14. R M 2
    Underground metal/non-metal · Royal Minerals Inc · MSHA ID 0202426
    Abandoned
  15. R MOUNTAIN MINE
    Underground metal/non-metal · Wilkins Exploration & Development Company · MSHA ID 0201993
    Abandoned
  16. Silica Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Phelps Dodge Corp · MSHA ID 0201320
    Abandoned
  17. Swapp Custom Crushing Plant #5
    Surface metal/non-metal · Swapp Construction Inc. · MSHA ID 0203448
    Abandoned
  18. Tailings Leach Plant
    Facility metal/non-metal · Phelps Dodge Corp · MSHA ID 0201198
    Abandoned
  19. TIPTON PIT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Tipton & Tipton Construction · MSHA ID 0202745
    Abandoned
  20. Virden Gravel Pit - Greenlee County
    Surface metal/non-metal · Greenlee County · MSHA ID 0202689
    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
Prospect Pit 653
Adit 455
Mine Shaft 124
Gravel Pit 28
Mine Dump 10
Tailings - Pond 8
Cinder Pit 6
Gravel Pit 5
Open Pit Mine 5
Open Pit Mine 4
Quarry 4
Borrow Pit 3
Strip Mine 1
Mine Dump 1
Mine 1
Borrow Pit 1
Leach Pond 1
Quarry 1
Tailings - Undifferentiated 1
Other counties in ArizonaAll 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.