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Abandoned mines › California
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Merced County, California

Merced County, California has 78 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1915–1971, including 11 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 9 prospect pits; 5 of the features carry a name on the map. MSHA's register carries 13 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Merced 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)
78
Mine openings
11
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
13
5 features carry a name9 prospect pits26 quadrangle maps, published 1915–1971 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
    11 14.1%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    9 11.5%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    5 6.4%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    36 46.2%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    17 21.8%
Named features on the maps5 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Los Banos Creek Borrow Pit area
Mariposa Mine Mine Shaft
Stayton Mine Adit
Stayton Mine Mine
Stayton 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 Abandoned13 on register
  1. Beutel Backhoe Service Plant #2
    Surface metal/non-metal · Beutel Backhoe Service · MSHA ID 0404499
    Abandoned
  2. Canyon Rock Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · F. S. Rod Incorporated · MSHA ID 0405804
    Abandoned
  3. CENTRAL VALLEY RESOURCES
    Surface metal/non-metal · Central Valley Resources Llc · MSHA ID 0405333
    Abandoned
  4. Cressey Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Cressey Sand & Gravel Inc · MSHA ID 0402838
    Abandoned
  5. Doolittle Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Santa Fe Aggregates Inc · MSHA ID 0405463
    Abandoned
  6. Kelsey Ranch Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Merced River Mining & Reclamation Company · MSHA ID 0405555
    Abandoned
  7. Merced Aggregates LLC
    Surface metal/non-metal · Merced Aggregates LLC · MSHA ID 0405586
    Abandoned
  8. Merced River Mining
    Surface metal/non-metal · Merced River Mining & Reclamation Corp · MSHA ID 0405538
    Abandoned
  9. Nordberg G Cone Crusher #1205
    Surface metal/non-metal · BJ Rees's Enterprise · MSHA ID 0405603
    Abandoned
  10. San Luis Rock
    Surface metal/non-metal · San Luis Rock · MSHA ID 0405241
    Abandoned
  11. Snelling Plant/George Reed Inc
    Surface metal/non-metal · George Reed Inc · MSHA ID 0404932
    Abandoned
  12. TURLOCK ROCK
    Surface metal/non-metal · Turlock Rock Company Inc · MSHA ID 0401991
    Abandoned
  13. Valley Sand & Gravel
    Surface metal/non-metal · Valley Sand & Gravel Inc · MSHA ID 0405478
    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
Gravel Pit 22
Tailings - Dredge 14
Prospect Pit 9
Adit 7
Quarry 6
Gravel Pit 4
Mine Shaft 4
Tailings - Undifferentiated 3
Open Pit Mine 2
Borrow Pit 2
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 2
Mine 1
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 1
Borrow Pit 1
Other counties in CaliforniaAll 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.