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Abandoned mines › Montana
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Lake County, Montana

Lake County, Montana has 70 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1964–1994, including 2 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 1 prospect pits; 1 of the features carry a name on the map. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 1 problems in the county, all of them reclaimed. 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 Lake 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)
70
Mine openings
2
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
21
1 features carry a name1 prospect pits22 quadrangle maps, published 1964–1994 1 OSMRE problems, 1 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
    3 4.2%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    1 1.4%
  3. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    67 94.4%
Named features on the maps1 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Jumbo 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 problems1 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Mcdonald/ravalli Mine P2 Portals 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 Abandoned21 on register
  1. Cedar Rapids Crusher
    Surface metal/non-metal · Smith Paving & Contracting · MSHA ID 2402096
    Abandoned
  2. Chewculator Incorporated
    Surface metal/non-metal · Chewculater Incorp · MSHA ID 2402026
    Abandoned
  3. Fischer Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Western Stone LLC · MSHA ID 2402355
    Abandoned
  4. Fryberger Excavation
    Surface metal/non-metal · Fryberger Excavation · MSHA ID 2402108
    Abandoned
  5. GLSG Portable Crusher
    Surface metal/non-metal · Glacier Lake Sand and Gravel, Inc. · MSHA ID 2402380
    Abandoned
  6. Lake County Commissioners (Screener)
    Surface metal/non-metal · Lake County Commissioners · MSHA ID 2402195
    Abandoned
  7. Mbi Crusher #1
    Facility metal/non-metal · Microbial Biotechnology Inc · MSHA ID 2401936
    Abandoned
  8. Mission Valley Concrete Crusher
    Surface metal/non-metal · Big Fork Ready Mix Inc · MSHA ID 2402452
    Abandoned
  9. MISSION VALLEY CONCRETE PIT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Mission Valley Concrete Industries Inc · MSHA ID 2401427
    Abandoned
  10. Mission Valley Concrete Wash Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Big Fork Ready Mix Inc · MSHA ID 2402451
    Abandoned
  11. MRM MOBILE CRUSHER #176
    Surface metal/non-metal · JTL Group Incorporated · MSHA ID 2402135
    Abandoned
  12. Polson Gravel Service
    Surface metal/non-metal · Roy'S Ready Mix Inc · MSHA ID 2400485
    Abandoned
  13. Polson Wash Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Knife River Missoula · MSHA ID 2400487
    Abandoned
  14. PORTABLE CRUSHER
    Surface metal/non-metal · Mission Valley Concrete Industries Inc · MSHA ID 2402198
    Abandoned
  15. PRM CRUSHER
    Surface metal/non-metal · Polson Ready Mix Concrete Inc · MSHA ID 2402094
    Abandoned
  16. Rip Rap Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · L A Construction--Dick Anderson Construction-J V · MSHA ID 2402036
    Abandoned
  17. Screenplant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Ninepipe Sand & Gravel · MSHA ID 2402492
    Abandoned
  18. The Hollow
    Surface metal/non-metal · Montana Rock Products Inc · MSHA ID 2402107
    Abandoned
  19. VALLEY ASPHALT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Valley Asphalt · MSHA ID 2402104
    Abandoned
  20. WIPP'S T & E PUGMILL
    Surface metal/non-metal · Wipp'S T & E · MSHA ID 2402088
    Abandoned
  21. WOODS BAY GRAVEL
    Surface metal/non-metal · Woods Bay Gravel · MSHA ID 2402136
    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
Gravel Pit 47
Gravel Pit 17
Quarry 2
Adit 1
Mine Shaft 1
Prospect Pit 1
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 1
P2 Portals 1
Other counties in MontanaAll 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.