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Abandoned mines › Idaho
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Nez Perce County, Idaho

Nez Perce County, Idaho has 74 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1958–1990, including 5 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts); 1 of the features carry a name on the map. MSHA's register carries 21 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Nez Perce 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)
74
Mine openings
5
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
21
1 features carry a name0 prospect pits20 quadrangle maps, published 1958–1990 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
    5 6.8%
  2. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    1 1.4%
  3. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    68 91.9%
Named features on the maps1 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Deer Creek 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 Abandoned21 on register
  1. Barnes Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Camas Gravel Company · MSHA ID 1001448
    Abandoned
  2. Buchanan Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Nez Perce County Road Bridge Department · MSHA ID 1001513
    Abandoned
  3. Crystal Sands
    Surface metal/non-metal · Crystal Sand Company · MSHA ID 1000314
    Abandoned
  4. Hatwai Creek Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Hatwai Sand & Gravel · MSHA ID 1001845
    Abandoned
  5. Jewett Crushing
    Surface metal/non-metal · Jewett Crushing · MSHA ID 1001965
    Abandoned
  6. Kaufman Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Nez Perce County Road Bridge Department · MSHA ID 1001438
    Abandoned
  7. Lewiston Hill Quarry 102
    Surface metal/non-metal · Nez Perce County Road Bridge Department · MSHA ID 1001484
    Abandoned
  8. Macintosh Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Lapwai Valley Highway District · MSHA ID 1001823
    Abandoned
  9. Mc Gregor Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · De Atley Company Inc · MSHA ID 1001376
    Abandoned
  10. Mission Creek Limestone
    Surface metal/non-metal · Nez Perce Tribal Enterprise System · MSHA ID 1000062
    Abandoned
  11. Mission Creek Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Nez Perce Tribal Limestone Enterprise · MSHA ID 1001803
    Abandoned
  12. Northwest Aggregates Of Idaho Incorporat
    Surface metal/non-metal · Northwest Aggregates Of Idaho Inc · MSHA ID 1001345
    Abandoned
  13. Paffile
    Surface metal/non-metal · Pre-Mix Inc N.W. · MSHA ID 1002320
    Abandoned
  14. Paffile Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Atlas Sand & Rock Inc · MSHA ID 1001433
    Abandoned
  15. Plant #7
    Surface metal/non-metal · DeAtley Crushing Company · MSHA ID 1002120
    Abandoned
  16. Portable Crushing Unit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Poe Asphalt Paving Inc · MSHA ID 1000042
    Abandoned
  17. Portable Screening Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Western Construction & Logging · MSHA ID 1001814
    Abandoned
  18. Relief Creek Project
    Surface metal/non-metal · D & D Mining · MSHA ID 1001686
    Abandoned
  19. Riggs Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Nez Perce County · MSHA ID 1001525
    Abandoned
  20. Spalding Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Murphy Brothers Inc · MSHA ID 1001412
    Abandoned
  21. Spalding Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Nez Perce County Road Bridge Department · MSHA ID 1001449
    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
Quarry 39
Borrow Pit 11
Gravel Pit 10
Gravel Pit 5
Adit 5
Quarry 2
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 1
Sand Pit 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.