Abandoned mines in Butte County, Idaho

1. Mine openings

   shafts, adits, air shafts, portals and vertical openings: the ways into underground workings
   141 21.3%
2. Prospect pits and trenches

   shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
   304 46.0%
3. Mines and surface workings

   labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
   6 0.9%
4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits

   construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
   204 30.9%
5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob

   what mining left above ground
   6 0.9%

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.

1. Butte County Crusher #1

   Surface metal/non-metal · Butte County Road & Bridge · MSHA ID 1001877
   Abandoned 2008-11-06
2. Champagne Mine

   Surface metal/non-metal · Idaho Gold Corp · MSHA ID 1001831
   Abandoned 1995-09-06
3. No Name Mine

   metal/non-metal · Mining Associates · MSHA ID 1001648
   Abandoned 1985-07-10

Status and date are as reported to MSHA by the operator. Each mine's own page carries its accident, citation and inspection record.

• Shoshone County 2,127
• Lemhi County 1,932
• Blaine County 1,606
• Owyhee County 1,364
• Custer County 1,282
• Idaho County 888
• Bonner County 412
• Valley County 389
• Boise County 353
• Elmore County 345
• Adams County 298
• Cassia County 274

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national inventory of abandoned mine features, and that the detailed national database now being built will not be published.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.