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← Abandoned mines, all states · Mining incidents in Utah
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Utah

Utah has 17,969 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1914–2002, including 6,825 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts), across 29 counties. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 798 problems in the state, 128 of them not yet reclaimed. MSHA's register carries 1,412 Utah mines with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps of Utah, every OSMRE abandoned mine land problem, and every MSHA-registered mine with status Abandoned, by county. Each county page lists the named features and links every MSHA mine to its own record.

Mapped mine features (USGS)
17,969
Mine openings
6,825
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
128
MSHA mines marked abandoned
1,412
29 counties with mapped features951 features carry a name7,542 prospect pitsmaps published 1914–2002 798 OSMRE problems, 670 reclaimed270 problem areas (PADs), 69 with work left 42 MSHA mines abandoned and sealed The state program's own inventory estimate: ~17,000 hazardous features (IMCC-NAAMLP Hardrock AML Report 2025, Table 5, page 46).
By countyranked by mapped USGS features
County USGS features Openings OSMRE problems MSHA abandoned
Juab County
2,946 1,072 22 46
Utah County
2,096 614 19 106
Tooele County
2,037 865 37 69
Beaver County
1,811 771 19 32
San Juan County
1,219 620 99 163
Salt Lake County
974 542 16 124
Box Elder County
846 273 6 67
Piute County
788 332 5 10
Millard County
730 117 8 41
Grand County
583 302 64 81
Uintah County
465 177 39 103
Emery County
458 301 80 88
Iron County
420 153 22 31
Garfield County
391 178 26 48
Sevier County
351 43 21 35
Summit County
329 67 56 33
Washington County
283 75 8 70
Wasatch County
213 57 10 20
Carbon County
201 101 163 84
Sanpete County
143 8 11 31
Duchesne County
126 36 12 24
Kane County
97 32 36 20
Weber County
95 7 2 22
Rich County
91 10 5 10
Cache County
84 21 2 21
Morgan County
69 20 2 7
Davis County
47 6 1 8
Wayne County
44 15 5 17
Daggett County
32 10 2 1
What the features are
  1. Mine openings
    shafts, adits, air shafts, portals and vertical openings: the ways into underground workings
    7,189 38.3%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    7,542 40.2%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    599 3.2%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    2,548 13.6%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    580 3.1%
  6. Mills, tipples and facilities
    processing plants and hazardous structures
    49 0.3%
  7. Other reclamation problems
    highwalls, subsidence, polluted or clogged water, fires, slides and gases in OSMRE's inventory
    257 1.4%
  8. Other
    symbols outside the classes above
    3 0.0%
By source vocabularythe publishers' own terms
Feature type Features
Prospect Pit 7,487
Adit 4,450
Mine Shaft 2,359
Gravel Pit 1,209
Gravel Pit 508
Open Pit Mine 334
Borrow Pit 315
Mine Dump 263
Quarry 231
P1 Portals 144
P1 Vertical Openings 107
P2 Portals 96
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 86
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 78
Open Pit Mine 72
Disturbed Surface 59
Tailings - Undifferentiated 58
P3 Gobs 55
Trench 54
Salt Evaporator 50
Quarry 45
Evaporation Pond 43
Borrow Pit 43
P2 Dangerous Piles & Embankments 42
P2 Hazardous Equip & Facilities 37
Cinder Pit 34
Clay Pit 30
Disturbed Surface - Pit 30
Tailings - Pond 30
P3 Other 27
P3 Equipment Facility 26
P3 Haul Road 22
P1 Subsidence 19
Mine 19
P3 Spoil Area 18
P2 Vertical Openings 17
Air Shaft 16
P2 Underground Mine Fires 14
P3 Water Problems 13
Clay Pit 12
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, and the map does not say which. An OSMRE row is a problem the abandoned mine land program tracks, not a mine, and several problems make one problem area (PAD), which is the unit a state program counts and reports; the public extract can also hold more problem areas than a state's live inventory, because areas since merged or ruled ineligible stay in the published file, so a state figure that differs from this one is not a contradiction. An MSHA mine is a registered operation whose operator reported abandonment, a record that starts in the 1970s; that is a regulatory status rather than a physical one, and it also holds operations merely between jobs, portable crushers above all, which is why over a thousand mines carrying it have been inspected in the last two years. The three overlap and are never added together. Counties are assigned from each feature's coordinates against the Census 2023 county boundaries. The full method and every source are 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.