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Abandoned mines › Colorado
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Eagle County, Colorado

Eagle County, Colorado has 347 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1934–1987, including 59 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 210 prospect pits; 15 of the features carry a name on the map. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 5 problems in the county, 2 of them not yet reclaimed. MSHA's register carries 24 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Eagle 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)
347
Mine openings
59
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
2
MSHA mines marked abandoned
24
15 features carry a name210 prospect pits22 quadrangle maps, published 1934–1987 5 OSMRE problems, 3 reclaimed 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
    63 17.9%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    210 59.7%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    29 8.2%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    46 13.1%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    3 0.9%
  6. Other reclamation problems
    highwalls, subsidence, polluted or clogged water, fires, slides and gases in OSMRE's inventory
    1 0.3%
Named features on the maps15 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Discovery Tunnel Adit
Dotsero Crater Mine Shaft
Eagle Mine Prospect Pit
El Capitan Mine Mine Shaft
El Capitan Mine Open Pit Mine
Hornsilver Mine Adit
Johnson Mine Adit
Lady Belle Mine Adit
Liberty Mine Adit
Liberty Mine Open Pit Mine
Newhouse Tunnel Adit
Ohio Tunnel Adit
Oxide Tailings Pond Tailings - Pond area
Polar Star Mine Adit
Sink Hole 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.

OSMRE abandoned mine land problems5 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Eagle - Non-coal-county-wide P1 Hazardous Water Bodies Reclamation Completed
Eagle - Non-coal-county-wide P1 Portals Reclamation Completed
Eagle - Non-coal-county-wide P1 Portals In Reclamation
Eagle - Non-coal-county-wide P1 Vertical Openings In Reclamation
Eagle - Non-coal-county-wide P1 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed

Problem types carry OSMRE's priority prefix: P1 and P2 are threats to health, safety and property, P3 is environmental. A problem area is a cluster of problems reclaimed as one project; several rows can share one location.

MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned24 on register
  1. Block Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Mayne Block & Stone Company · MSHA ID 0500434
    Abandoned
  2. Blue Heron Estates Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Domenic Leone Construction Company · MSHA ID 0503285
    Abandoned
  3. CALHOUN-EATON PIT
    Surface metal/non-metal · B & B Excavating Inc · MSHA ID 0502140
    Abandoned
  4. Dot O Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · L G Everist Inc · MSHA ID 0503886
    Abandoned
  5. Eagle Mine
    Underground metal/non-metal · Miller Enterprises · MSHA ID 0500411
    Abandoned
  6. Ground Hog
    Underground metal/non-metal · Elliott Venture Ltd · MSHA ID 0503773
    Abandoned
  7. Hidden Valley Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · B & B Excavating Inc · MSHA ID 0503888
    Abandoned
  8. Hidden Valley Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · B & B Excavating Co Inc · MSHA ID 0504858
    Abandoned
  9. Homeward Bound Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Homeward Bound Inc · MSHA ID 0502138
    Abandoned
  10. Mc Nulty Cinder
    Surface metal/non-metal · Colorado Department Of Highways · MSHA ID 0503520
    Abandoned
  11. Mc Nulty Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Mc Nulty Pumice Products · MSHA ID 0504309
    Abandoned
  12. McNulty Cinder Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Zen Excavation, Inc · MSHA ID 0504941
    Abandoned
  13. MONTGOMERY PIT
    Surface metal/non-metal · B & B Excavating Inc · MSHA ID 0504432
    Abandoned
  14. Northern Portable Plant #11
    Surface metal/non-metal · Martin Marietta Materials · MSHA ID 0504059
    Abandoned
  15. NORTHERN PORTABLE PLANT #8
    Surface metal/non-metal · Lafarge West Incorporated · MSHA ID 0504365
    Abandoned
  16. Pinon Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · R E Monks Construction Company · MSHA ID 0504344
    Abandoned
  17. Pioneer 30 X 42 Primary
    Surface metal/non-metal · Nottingham Sand & Gravel · MSHA ID 0503102
    Abandoned
  18. Schmidt Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Nottingham Sand & Gravel · MSHA ID 0504031
    Abandoned
  19. State Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Colorado Department Of Highways · MSHA ID 0503354
    Abandoned
  20. Two River Investment Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Corn Construction Company · MSHA ID 0503912
    Abandoned
  21. Two Rivers Investment Co Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Corn Construction Company · MSHA ID 0503355
    Abandoned
  22. Two Rivers North
    Surface metal/non-metal · Colorado Department Of Highways · MSHA ID 0503356
    Abandoned
  23. Universal 22-36 Primary
    Surface metal/non-metal · Nottingham Sand & Gravel · MSHA ID 0503484
    Abandoned
  24. Wyoming Mine
    Underground metal/non-metal · Gold Fields Mining Corp · MSHA ID 0503701
    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 210
Adit 48
Gravel Pit 20
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 17
Gravel Pit 10
Mine Shaft 9
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 9
Open Pit Mine 9
Quarry 5
Disturbed Surface 3
Tailings - Pond 3
P1 Portals 2
P1 Vertical Openings 2
Air Shaft 2
Borrow Pit 1
P1 Hazardous Water Bodies 1
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 1
Other counties in ColoradoAll 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.