Abandoned mines in Judith Basin County, Montana

1. Mine openings

   shafts, adits, air shafts, portals and vertical openings: the ways into underground workings
   101 27.6%
2. Prospect pits and trenches

   shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
   136 37.2%
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
   77 21.0%
5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob

   what mining left above ground
   24 6.6%
6. Mills, tipples and facilities

   processing plants and hazardous structures
   8 2.2%
7. Other reclamation problems

   highwalls, subsidence, polluted or clogged water, fires, slides and gases in OSMRE's inventory
   19 5.2%

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.

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.

1. ACI

   Surface metal/non-metal · Antonich Construction & Logging Inc · MSHA ID 2402590
   Abandoned 2011-10-21
2. Basin Angus Ranch Pit

   Surface metal/non-metal · Phillips Construction · MSHA ID 2402429
   Abandoned 2006-06-15
3. Geyser

   Surface metal/non-metal · GCC Three Forks, LLC. · MSHA ID 2402641
   Abandoned 2024-05-02
4. Judith Basin Portable Crusher

   Surface metal/non-metal · Judith Basin County Road Department · MSHA ID 2401597
   Abandoned 1982-08-18
5. Judith Gap Pit

   Surface metal/non-metal · Major Rock Supplies · MSHA ID 2402534
   Abandoned 2009-09-11
6. Liberty Mine

   Underground metal/non-metal · Amax Exploration Inc · MSHA ID 2401516
   Abandoned 1981-03-24
7. Montgomery Mine

   Surface metal/non-metal · Carwyn Eierman · MSHA ID 2401531
   Abandoned 1981-07-08
8. Sir Walter Scott

   Surface metal/non-metal · Running Wolf Mining · MSHA ID 2401774
   Abandoned 1985-05-07
9. Spion-Kop Aggregate

   Surface metal/non-metal · Dick Anderson Construction, Inc. · MSHA ID 2402620
   Abandoned 2013-05-25
10. Vincent Mine

    Surface metal/non-metal · Scott Vincent Contracting · MSHA ID 2402654
    Abandoned 2014-11-18
11. Vortex Mine

    Surface metal/non-metal · Yogo Mining Company LLC · MSHA ID 2401835
    Abandoned 2023-05-02
12. Yukon Mining, Inc.

    Underground metal/non-metal · Yukon Mining, Inc. · MSHA ID 2402089
    Abandoned 2001-09-11

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

• Madison County 3,766
• Silver Bow County 2,397
• Jefferson County 1,973
• Lewis and Clark County 1,862
• Broadwater County 1,418
• Beaverhead County 1,378
• Carbon County 769
• Powell County 741
• Granite County 719
• Cascade County 708
• Deer Lodge County 688
• Fergus County 550

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.