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Abandoned mines › Idaho
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Boundary County, Idaho

Boundary County, Idaho has 145 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1965–1997, including 46 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 24 prospect pits; 17 of the features carry a name on the map. 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 Boundary 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
46
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
11
17 features carry a name24 prospect pits20 quadrangle maps, published 1965–1997 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
    46 31.7%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    24 16.6%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    1 0.7%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    72 49.7%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    2 1.4%
Named features on the maps17 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
American Girl Mine Mine Shaft
Bethlehem Mine Adit
Boulder Mine Mine Shaft
Buckhorn Mine Adit
Continental Mine Mine Dump area
Continental Mine Mine Shaft
Continental Mine Tailings - Undifferentiated area
Golden Scepter Mine Prospect Pit
Homestake Mine Adit
McLean Mine Adit
Miller Brothers Mine Adit
Montgomery Mine Adit
Parker Mine Adit
Queen Mine Adit
Regal Mine Adit
Tilley Mine Adit
Tungsten Hill 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 Abandoned11 on register
  1. B F Redi-Mix Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · B F Redi-Mix Inc · MSHA ID 1001753
    Abandoned
  2. Brannon Pit By-5
    Surface metal/non-metal · Peak Paving Company Inc · MSHA ID 1001132
    Abandoned
  3. Deboer Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Rock Pine Inc · MSHA ID 1002366
    Abandoned
  4. District 2 Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Bonners Ferry Redi-Mix · MSHA ID 1000796
    Abandoned
  5. Moyie Pit #2
    Surface metal/non-metal · Boundary County Road & Bridge Department · MSHA ID 1000662
    Abandoned
  6. Perkins Lake Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Boundary County Road & Bridge Department · MSHA ID 1001410
    Abandoned
  7. Pit #1 Cow Creek
    Surface metal/non-metal · W R Sutherland General Contractors · MSHA ID 1000272
    Abandoned
  8. Plant =1 \Portable Crusher'
    metal/non-metal · Deatley Company · MSHA ID 1002821
    Abandoned
  9. Portable S & G
    Surface metal/non-metal · American Materials Inc · MSHA ID 1001754
    Abandoned
  10. Portrey Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Boundary County Road & Bridge Department · MSHA ID 1001530
    Abandoned
  11. Zimmerman Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · W R Sutherland General Contractors · MSHA ID 1000580
    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
Adit 40
Gravel Pit 32
Borrow Pit 26
Prospect Pit 24
Mine Shaft 6
Gravel Pit 6
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 5
Sand Pit 2
Tailings - Undifferentiated 1
Quarry 1
Open Pit Mine 1
Mine Dump 1
Other counties in IdahoAll 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.