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Abandoned mines › North Dakota
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Dunn County, North Dakota

Dunn County, North Dakota has 66 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1962–1974. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 10 problems in the county, 8 of them not yet reclaimed. MSHA's register carries 10 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Dunn 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)
66
Mine openings
0
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
8
MSHA mines marked abandoned
10
0 features carry a name0 prospect pits27 quadrangle maps, published 1962–1974 10 OSMRE problems, 2 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
    2 2.6%
  2. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    1 1.3%
  3. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    65 85.5%
  4. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    2 2.6%
  5. Other reclamation problems
    highwalls, subsidence, polluted or clogged water, fires, slides and gases in OSMRE's inventory
    6 7.9%
OSMRE abandoned mine land problems10 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Isaak Farm P2 Dangerous Highwalls Reclamation Pending
Isaak Farm P2 Portals Reclamation Completed
Isaak Farm P2 Subsidence Reclamation Pending
Isaak Farm P2 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
Isaak Farm P3 Spoil Area In Reclamation
Jablonsky P2 Subsidence Reclamation Pending
Shell Creek P3 Pits In Reclamation
Shell Creek P3 Spoil Area Reclamation Pending
Spring Creek P2 Dangerous Highwalls Reclamation Pending
Spring Creek P2 Subsidence Reclamation Pending

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 Abandoned10 on register
  1. #710 TESAB CRUSHER
    Surface metal/non-metal · TROTTER CONSTRUCTION INC · MSHA ID 3200850
    Abandoned
  2. Arnold Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Pinnacle Materials, Inc. · MSHA ID 3200922
    Abandoned
  3. B Pit Crusher 2
    Surface metal/non-metal · Buehner Construction LLP · MSHA ID 3200976
    Abandoned
  4. Big Hill 1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Big Hill Resources LLC · MSHA ID 3201070
    Abandoned
  5. Crusher #1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Buehner Construction LLP · MSHA ID 3200845
    Abandoned
  6. DUNN COUNTY CRUSHER
    Surface metal/non-metal · Dunn County · MSHA ID 3200647
    Abandoned
  7. Iron Horse Portable 1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Iron Horse Industrial Services Inc · MSHA ID 3201008
    Abandoned
  8. Jablonski Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Badinger Sand & Gravel · MSHA ID 3200456
    Abandoned
  9. Portable Crusher #1
    Surface metal/non-metal · SB Mining · MSHA ID 3200994
    Abandoned
  10. Screen 1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Buehner Construction LLP · MSHA ID 3200848
    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 52
Scoria Pit 7
Gravel Pit 6
P2 Subsidence 3
P2 Dangerous Highwalls 2
P3 Spoil Area 2
P2 Vertical Openings 1
P2 Portals 1
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 1
P3 Pits 1
Other counties in North DakotaAll 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.