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Abandoned mines › Colorado
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Hinsdale County, Colorado

Hinsdale County, Colorado has 361 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1897–2001, including 128 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 225 prospect pits; 16 of the features carry a name on the map. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 5 problems in the county, all of them reclaimed. MSHA's register carries 11 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Hinsdale 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)
361
Mine openings
128
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
11
16 features carry a name225 prospect pits16 quadrangle maps, published 1897–2001 5 OSMRE problems, 5 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
    132 36.1%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    225 61.5%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    1 0.3%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    7 1.9%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    1 0.3%
Named features on the maps16 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Belle of the East Mine Adit
Belle of the West Mine Adit
California Mine Adit
Cleveland Mine Adit
Cora Mine Adit
Czar Mine Adit
Czarina Mine Mine Shaft
Fanny Fern Mine Adit
Golden Wonder Mine Adit
Hidden Treasure Mine Mine Shaft
Hough Mine Mine Shaft
Pelican Mine Adit
Polar Star Mine Mine
Pride of America Mine Adit
Silver Jack Mine Adit
Yellow Medicine 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.

OSMRE abandoned mine land problems5 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Hinsdale - Non-coal-county-wide P1 Portals Reclamation Completed
Hinsdale - Non-coal-county-wide P1 Portals Reclamation Completed
Hinsdale - Non-coal-county-wide P1 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Hinsdale - Non-coal-county-wide P1 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Hinsdale - Non-coal-county-wide P3 Gobs 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 Abandoned11 on register
  1. Champion Mine
    Underground metal/non-metal · Reserve Mining Company · MSHA ID 0502568
    Abandoned
  2. Claussen mesa pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Hinsdale County Road and Bridge · MSHA ID 0505120
    Abandoned
  3. Gladiator-Gen Sherman
    Underground metal/non-metal · Colorado Gold & Silver Inc · MSHA ID 0503576
    Abandoned
  4. Golconda
    Underground metal/non-metal · Bear Creek Mining Company · MSHA ID 0503083
    Abandoned
  5. Golden Wonder
    Underground metal/non-metal · Coal Creek Construction · MSHA ID 0501506
    Abandoned
  6. GOLDEN WONDER
    Underground metal/non-metal · Orvis-Barker Mining · MSHA ID 0502387
    Abandoned
  7. Pride Of America
    Underground metal/non-metal · Ada-Mar Mines Inc · MSHA ID 0502734
    Abandoned
  8. Risorgimento
    Underground metal/non-metal · Hughes Mining Company · MSHA ID 0503103
    Abandoned
  9. Ute Ule Mine & Mill
    Facility metal/non-metal · Golden Wonder Mining Llc · MSHA ID 0502945
    Abandoned
  10. Varden Bell
    Underground metal/non-metal · Varden Bell Mining Company · MSHA ID 0504008
    Abandoned
  11. Vc Bar Ranch Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Southway Construction Company Inc · MSHA ID 0503722
    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 225
Adit 111
Mine Shaft 17
Gravel Pit 4
P1 Vertical Openings 2
P1 Portals 2
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 2
Mine 1
P3 Gobs 1
Gravel Pit 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.