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Abandoned mines › New Mexico
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Otero County, New Mexico

Otero County, New Mexico has 311 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1940–2004, including 55 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 127 prospect pits; 17 of the features carry a name on the map. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 4 problems in the county, 3 of them not yet reclaimed. MSHA's register carries 22 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Otero 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)
311
Mine openings
55
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
3
MSHA mines marked abandoned
22
17 features carry a name127 prospect pits48 quadrangle maps, published 1940–2004 4 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
    57 18.1%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    127 40.3%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    25 7.9%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    100 31.7%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    5 1.6%
  6. Other reclamation problems
    highwalls, subsidence, polluted or clogged water, fires, slides and gases in OSMRE's inventory
    1 0.3%
Named features on the maps17 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Alice Mine Mine Shaft
Alice Mine Open Pit Mine
Alice Mine Prospect Pit
Courtney Mine Adit
Courtney Mine Mine Shaft
Garnet Mine Mine Shaft
Garnet Mine Open Pit Mine
Garnet Mine Prospect Pit
Iron Queen Mine Open Pit Mine
Iron Queen Mine Prospect Pit
Little Joe Mine Mine Shaft
Little Joe Mine Tailings - Undifferentiated area
Mannie Baird Mine Mine Shaft
Nannie Beard Mine Open Pit Mine
Nannie Beard Mine Prospect Pit
Warnock Mine Adit
Warnock 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 problems4 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Orogrande I P1 Dangerous Highwalls Reclamation Completed
Orogrande I P1 Portals In Reclamation
Orogrande I P1 Vertical Openings In Reclamation
Orogrande I P3 Spoil Area In Reclamation

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 Abandoned22 on register
  1. Alamo Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Alamo Materials Company · MSHA ID 2900416
    Abandoned
  2. B & P Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Thomason Construction Company Inc · MSHA ID 2902017
    Abandoned
  3. CATHEY CANYON PIT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Nielsons Skanska Inc · MSHA ID 2902225
    Abandoned
  4. Crusher #1
    Surface metal/non-metal · A & S Construction Company Of New Mexico Inc · MSHA ID 2901847
    Abandoned
  5. Crusher/Screener #1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Mesa Verde Enterprises Inc · MSHA ID 2902164
    Abandoned
  6. Dugan Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · T Brown Constructors Inc · MSHA ID 2902005
    Abandoned
  7. Hiles Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · C S Mc Crossan Inc · MSHA ID 2901940
    Abandoned
  8. Indian Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Loomis Construction Company Inc · MSHA ID 2901761
    Abandoned
  9. Iron Duke Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · Gulf Coast Mining Group · MSHA ID 2902497
    Abandoned
  10. L E Muncy Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · L E Muncy & Son Sand & Gravel Company · MSHA ID 2901781
    Abandoned
  11. LA LUZ PIT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Aggregate Technologies · MSHA ID 2900445
    Abandoned
  12. Little Apache Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Batte Enterprises · MSHA ID 2902002
    Abandoned
  13. Mayhill Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Swope Gravel · MSHA ID 2901932
    Abandoned
  14. Muncy Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · L E Muncy Sand & Gravel · MSHA ID 2900868
    Abandoned
  15. ONYX PORTABLE 2
    Surface metal/non-metal · Onyx Construction · MSHA ID 3200775
    Abandoned
  16. Pioneer Portable
    Surface metal/non-metal · Batte Enterprises · MSHA ID 2902068
    Abandoned
  17. PORTABLE CRUSHER
    Surface metal/non-metal · Derrick Construction · MSHA ID 2902151
    Abandoned
  18. Project #Hes 000 S(19)
    Surface metal/non-metal · J R Hale Contracting Company Inc · MSHA ID 2901858
    Abandoned
  19. State Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Loomis Construction Company Inc · MSHA ID 2901758
    Abandoned
  20. Timberon Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · North American Land Development Company · MSHA ID 2901757
    Abandoned
  21. TULAROSA PROJECT
    Surface metal/non-metal · Jobe Concrete Products Inc · MSHA ID 2902163
    Abandoned
  22. Wind Mountain
    Underground metal/non-metal · Addwest Minerals Inc · MSHA ID 2902138
    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
Prospect Pit 126
Gravel Pit 56
Mine Shaft 31
Gravel Pit 28
Adit 24
Open Pit Mine 13
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 12
Quarry 6
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 5
Borrow Pit 2
Tailings - Undifferentiated 2
Borrow Pit 2
Mine Dump 2
P1 Portals 1
P3 Spoil Area 1
Quarry 1
P1 Dangerous Highwalls 1
P1 Vertical Openings 1
Prospect Pit 1
Other counties in New MexicoAll 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.