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Abandoned mines › Utah
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Piute County, Utah

Piute County, Utah has 788 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1937–2002, including 332 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 426 prospect pits; 21 of the features carry a name on the map. OSMRE's abandoned mine land inventory lists 5 problems in the county, all of them 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 Piute 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)
788
Mine openings
332
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
10
21 features carry a name426 prospect pits17 quadrangle maps, published 1937–2002 5 OSMRE problems, 5 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
    337 42.5%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    426 53.7%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    10 1.3%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    20 2.5%
Named features on the maps21 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Annie Laurie Mine Adit
Blackbird Mine Open Pit Mine
Bradburn Mine Adit
Copper Belt Mine Adit
Deer Trail Mine Adit
Deer Trail Mine Open Pit Mine
Grasshopper Mine Adit
Log Cabin Mine Adit
Mineral Products Mine Adit
Prospector Mine Adit
Rainbow Mine Adit
Sevier Mine Adit
Sevier Mine Adit
Silver King Mine Adit
Silver King Mine Adit
Trappers Pride Mine Mine Shaft
VCA Mine Mine Shaft
Wedge Mine Adit
Whitehorse Mine Open Pit Mine
Whitehorse Mine Open Pit Mine
Yellow Cougar Mine Mine Shaft

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 problems5 on inventory
Problem area Problem Status
Bullion Canyon P1 Portals Reclamation Completed
Bullion Canyon P1 Vertical Openings Reclamation Completed
White Horse P1 Portals Reclamation Completed
White Horse P1 Portals Reclamation Completed
White Horse P1 Vertical Openings 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 Abandoned10 on register
  1. 81-1027
    Surface metal/non-metal · W. W. Clyde & Co. · MSHA ID 4202355
    Abandoned
  2. Advocate Mine
    Underground metal/non-metal · Centennial Development Company · MSHA ID 4202004
    Abandoned
  3. Annie Laurie - Sevier
    Underground metal/non-metal · Kimberly Consolidated Mines Inc · MSHA ID 4201067
    Abandoned
  4. DEER TRAIL
    Underground metal/non-metal · DT Mining LLC · MSHA ID 4200260
    Abandoned
  5. Junction gravel pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Morrison Rock L.L.C · MSHA ID 4202781
    Abandoned
  6. Koosharem
    Surface metal/non-metal · Interstate Brick Company · MSHA ID 4201991
    Abandoned
  7. Rainbow Mine
    Underground metal/non-metal · Alkent Mining Company · MSHA ID 4200953
    Abandoned
  8. RD Horton
    Surface metal/non-metal · RD Horton LLC · MSHA ID 4202470
    Abandoned
  9. Sevier Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Annie Laurie Mining Ventures Limited · MSHA ID 4201255
    Abandoned
  10. Sugar Daddy Incline
    Underground metal/non-metal · Energy Fuels Nuclear Inc · MSHA ID 4200619
    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 426
Adit 304
Mine Shaft 28
Gravel Pit 15
Open Pit Mine 9
Borrow Pit 4
P1 Portals 3
P1 Vertical Openings 2
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 1
Gravel Pit 1
Other counties in UtahAll 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.