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Abandoned mines › Washington
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Pend Oreille County, Washington

Pend Oreille County, Washington has 175 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1952–1986, including 50 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 20 prospect pits; 20 of the features carry a name on the map. MSHA's register carries 18 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Pend Oreille 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)
175
Mine openings
50
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
18
20 features carry a name20 prospect pits26 quadrangle maps, published 1952–1986 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
    50 28.6%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    20 11.4%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    8 4.6%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    91 52.0%
  5. Dumps, tailings, spoil and gob
    what mining left above ground
    6 3.4%
Named features on the maps20 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Bella May Mine Mine Shaft
Gardner Cave Adit
Gold Hill Mine Open Pit Mine
Grandview Mine Adit
Grandview Mine Mine Dump area
Grandview Mine Open Pit Mine
High Noon Mine Adit
Josephine Mine Mine Shaft
Lasota Mine Adit
Last Chance Mine Adit
Lead Hill Mine Adit
Lucky Strike Mine Mine Shaft
Manresa Grotto Adit
Morning Mine Adit
Oriole Mine Adit
Pend Oreille Mine Mine Shaft
Riverside Mine Adit
Rocky Creek Mine Mine Shaft
Silver King Mine Adit
Triple H 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.

MSHA-registered mines with status Abandoned18 on register
  1. Cement Plant
    Facility metal/non-metal · Lehigh Portland Cement Company · MSHA ID 4502749
    Abandoned
  2. Costa Mine
    Surface metal/non-metal · George Costa Owner · MSHA ID 4500891
    Abandoned
  3. Easy Street
    Surface metal/non-metal · Bockman Construction Inc · MSHA ID 4503094
    Abandoned
  4. Fairview Claims
    Underground metal/non-metal · P & H Exploration & Mining Corp · MSHA ID 4503209
    Abandoned
  5. Glass Mine
    Underground metal/non-metal · Raven Hill Mining Incorp · MSHA ID 4503176
    Abandoned
  6. Highland Road Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · U S Forest Service · MSHA ID 4502044
    Abandoned
  7. J L Sherman Excavation Co
    Surface metal/non-metal · Interstate Concrete & Asphalt Company · MSHA ID 4503100
    Abandoned
  8. Le Clerc Creek Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · U S Forest Service · MSHA ID 4502441
    Abandoned
  9. Metaline Falls Washington Plant Of Lafar
    Facility metal/non-metal · Lafarge Corp · MSHA ID 4500042
    Abandoned
  10. Metaline Mining & Leasing Company
    Underground metal/non-metal · Dunker Hill Company · MSHA ID 4502599
    Abandoned
  11. Portable Plant Operation
    Surface metal/non-metal · Pend Oreille County · MSHA ID 4502683
    Abandoned
  12. Portable Screen Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Robinson Excavating & Trucking · MSHA ID 4503174
    Abandoned
  13. Ps-Po-103
    Surface metal/non-metal · N A Degerstrom Inc · MSHA ID 4502113
    Abandoned
  14. Ps-Po-63
    Surface metal/non-metal · Roy Rich & Sons Inc · MSHA ID 4502660
    Abandoned
  15. Quartzite Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Lehigh Portland Cement Company · MSHA ID 4501522
    Abandoned
  16. Silver King
    Underground metal/non-metal · Silver King Mining & Milling Company · MSHA ID 4500432
    Abandoned
  17. Smith Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Newport Equipment Enterprises, Inc · MSHA ID 4503666
    Abandoned
  18. Yellowhead Mine
    Underground metal/non-metal · Bunker Hill Company · MSHA ID 4501225
    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 48
Adit 39
Prospect Pit 20
Borrow Pit 16
Gravel Pit 13
Mine Shaft 11
Quarry 6
Open Pit Mine 4
Tailings - Undifferentiated 4
Open Pit Mine 3
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 3
Sand Pit 3
Mine Dump 2
Borrow Pit 1
Quarry 1
Disturbed Surface - Pit 1
Other counties in WashingtonAll 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.