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Abandoned mines › California
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Modoc County, California

Modoc County, California has 414 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1951–1993, including 51 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 74 prospect pits; 17 of the features carry a name on the map. MSHA's register carries 14 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Modoc 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)
414
Mine openings
51
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
14
17 features carry a name74 prospect pits63 quadrangle maps, published 1951–1993 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
    51 12.3%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    74 17.9%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    22 5.3%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    267 64.5%
Named features on the maps17 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Blue Bell Mine Adit
Blue Bell Mine Open Pit Mine area
Consolidated Mines Mine Shaft
Consolidated Mines Prospect Pit
Damons Cave Adit
Fern Cave Adit
Klondyke Mines Adit
Klondyke Mines Mine Shaft
Lost Cabin Mine Mine Shaft
Lost Cabin Mine Mine Shaft
Modoc Mines Adit
Modoc Mines Mine
Moonlight Mines Adit
Moonlight Mines Open Pit Mine area
Morrel Mine Mine
Morrel Mine Mine Shaft
Sunshine Mine 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 Abandoned14 on register
  1. CALDWELL CINDER PIT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Mt Lassen Cinder Company · MSHA ID 0405436
    Abandoned
  2. Fitch'S Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · O'Hair Construction Company · MSHA ID 0404424
    Abandoned
  3. Goodwin Sand And Gravel
    Surface metal/non-metal · Goodwin Sand & Gravel Inc · MSHA ID 0404077
    Abandoned
  4. Haywire Mine & Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Haywire Mining Company · MSHA ID 0404431
    Abandoned
  5. Hindle Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Modoc County Road Department · MSHA ID 0404167
    Abandoned
  6. Jess Valley Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Radel Inc · MSHA ID 0404868
    Abandoned
  7. Joiner Portable
    Surface metal/non-metal · Joiner Construction Inc · MSHA ID 0405437
    Abandoned
  8. Joiner Portable #2
    Surface metal/non-metal · Joiner Construction Inc · MSHA ID 0405634
    Abandoned
  9. Lava Camp Pit And Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Southern Oregon Rock Company · MSHA ID 0404237
    Abandoned
  10. Portable Crusher
    Surface metal/non-metal · Eagle Peak Rock & Paving, Inc. · MSHA ID 0405720
    Abandoned
  11. Rice Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Modac County Road Commission · MSHA ID 0403824
    Abandoned
  12. Shaw Ranch Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · O'Hair Construction Company · MSHA ID 0404425
    Abandoned
  13. South Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Eagle Peak Rock and Paving · MSHA ID 0405431
    Abandoned
  14. Weber Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Modac County Road Commission · MSHA ID 0404078
    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
Borrow Pit 101
Prospect Pit 74
Gravel Pit 69
Borrow Pit 39
Adit 28
Mine Shaft 22
Gravel Pit 17
Cinder Pit 14
Cinder Pit 12
Quarry 8
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 7
Open Pit Mine 6
Open Pit Mine 6
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 5
Mine 3
Sand Pit 1
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 1
Glory Hole 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.