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Abandoned mines › California
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Tehama County, California

Tehama County, California has 145 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1949–1998, including 7 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 74 prospect pits; 12 of the features carry a name on the map. MSHA's register carries 18 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Tehama 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)
145
Mine openings
7
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
18
12 features carry a name74 prospect pits34 quadrangle maps, published 1949–1998 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
    7 4.8%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    74 51.0%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    15 10.3%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    46 31.7%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    3 2.1%
Named features on the maps12 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Chrome Mine (Site) Mine
Grau Mine Open Pit Mine
Grau Mine Open Pit Mine
Ice Cave Adit
Inskip Caves Adit
Kingsley Adit
Kleinsorge Mine Open Pit Mine
Kleinsorge Mine Open Pit Mine
South Elder Mine Open Pit Mine
Sunshine Mine Open Pit Mine
Tomhead Mine Adit
Tomhead Mine Adit

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 Abandoned18 on register
  1. ABEL RANCH
    Surface metal/non-metal · Richfield Recycling · MSHA ID 0405467
    Abandoned
  2. Al-Bons Crusher
    Surface metal/non-metal · Al-Bon Corp · MSHA ID 0401684
    Abandoned
  3. Clement Avenue Gravel Bar
    Surface metal/non-metal · Tehama County Excavating · MSHA ID 0404192
    Abandoned
  4. Cottonwood Creek Sand & Gravel
    Surface metal/non-metal · Cottonwood Creek Sand & Gravel · MSHA ID 0402708
    Abandoned
  5. Diamond Mobile Crushing
    Surface metal/non-metal · Diamond Mobile Crushing · MSHA ID 0405953
    Abandoned
  6. Dudleys' Underground Construction Incorp
    Surface metal/non-metal · Dudleys' Underground Construction Inc · MSHA ID 0405045
    Abandoned
  7. Endicott Rock Sand and Gravel
    Surface metal/non-metal · Endicott Rock Sand and Gravel · MSHA ID 0405751
    Abandoned
  8. Endicott Trucking
    Surface metal/non-metal · Endicott Trucking · MSHA ID 0405112
    Abandoned
  9. FOX'S SAND & GRAVEL
    Surface metal/non-metal · Fox'S Sand & Gravel · MSHA ID 0402772
    Abandoned
  10. Latten Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Tehama County Excavating · MSHA ID 0404191
    Abandoned
  11. Mills Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Valley Rock Products Inc · MSHA ID 0404304
    Abandoned
  12. Miner'S Sand & Gravel
    Surface metal/non-metal · Miner'S Sand & Gravel · MSHA ID 0404996
    Abandoned
  13. NorCal Mobile Rock Crushing
    Surface metal/non-metal · Cedar Creek Corporation · MSHA ID 0405968
    Abandoned
  14. PORTABLE SCREEN PLANT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Tehama County Road Department · MSHA ID 0401046
    Abandoned
  15. Red Bank Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Red Bluff Rock · MSHA ID 0404247
    Abandoned
  16. Thr Pit And Mill
    Surface metal/non-metal · Thr Company · MSHA ID 0401979
    Abandoned
  17. various locations
    Surface metal/non-metal · Harless Land Leveling · MSHA ID 0405789
    Abandoned
  18. Wolf Ranch
    Surface metal/non-metal · Crain Orchards, Inc. · MSHA ID 0405919
    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 74
Gravel Pit 22
Open Pit Mine 10
Adit 7
Borrow Pit 6
Quarry 5
Gravel Pit 4
Quarry 4
Tailings - Undifferentiated 3
Borrow Pit 3
Disturbed Surface - Pit 2
Mine 1
Disturbed Surface 1
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 1
Cinder Pit 1
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 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.