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Abandoned mines › Washington
Abandoned mine inventory

Abandoned mines in Skamania County, Washington

Skamania County, Washington has 191 mine and prospect features on USGS topographic maps published 1953–1998, including 23 mine openings (shafts, adits and air shafts) and 7 prospect pits; 20 of the features carry a name on the map. MSHA's register carries 34 mines in the county with status Abandoned or Abandoned and Sealed.

Every mine and prospect feature the USGS digitized from historical topographic maps covering Skamania 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)
191
Mine openings
23
OSMRE problems unreclaimed
0
MSHA mines marked abandoned
34
20 features carry a name7 prospect pits39 quadrangle maps, published 1953–1998 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
    23 12.0%
  2. Prospect pits and trenches
    shallow exploration diggings that never became a mine
    7 3.7%
  3. Mines and surface workings
    labelled mines, open pits, strip mines, placer and hydraulic workings
    8 4.2%
  4. Quarries, gravel and borrow pits
    construction-material and industrial-mineral extraction
    153 80.1%
Named features on the maps20 named · from the USGS compilation
Name on map Feature
Black Prince Mine Prospect Pit
Chicago Mine Prospect Pit
Commonwealth Mine Prospect Pit
Golconda Mine Adit
Ice Caves Adit
Lang Mine Adit
Last Chance Mine Adit
Last Hope Mine Mine
Lava Cave Adit
Lava Cave Adit
Lava Cave Adit
Lava Caves Adit
Lone Butte Quarry Quarry
Minnie Lee Mine Prospect Pit
Polar Star Mine Adit
Skamania Mine Adit
Skamania Mine Adit
Sweden Mine Prospect Pit
Williams Mine Mine Shaft
Wind River 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 Abandoned34 on register
  1. Alec Creek Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · International Paper Company · MSHA ID 4502545
    Abandoned
  2. Bean Creek Ridge Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Moultrie Crushing Inc · MSHA ID 4502710
    Abandoned
  3. Big Creek Pit Camp Two
    Surface metal/non-metal · Ernest Levold Inc · MSHA ID 4502580
    Abandoned
  4. Blue Lake Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Skamania County · MSHA ID 4502347
    Abandoned
  5. CAPE HORN
    Surface metal/non-metal · George Schmid Llc · MSHA ID 4503055
    Abandoned
  6. Cape Horn Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Schmid & Sons · MSHA ID 4502490
    Abandoned
  7. Cook Grade Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Skamania County · MSHA ID 4502522
    Abandoned
  8. Curley Creek Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Louisiana Pacific Corp · MSHA ID 4502544
    Abandoned
  9. Delano Wind River Mill
    Facility metal/non-metal · Delano Wind River Mine · MSHA ID 4503327
    Abandoned
  10. DELANO WIND RIVER MINE
    Underground metal/non-metal · Delano Wind River Mine · MSHA ID 4503015
    Abandoned
  11. Fossil Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Sierra Cascade Equipment Inc · MSHA ID 4502547
    Abandoned
  12. Gravel Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Howell Truck Service · MSHA ID 4502349
    Abandoned
  13. Hamilton Creek Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Columbia Gorge Builders · MSHA ID 4502313
    Abandoned
  14. Hamilton Mountain Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Columbia Gorge Builders · MSHA ID 4502312
    Abandoned
  15. Keller Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Skamania County · MSHA ID 4502548
    Abandoned
  16. Keller Pit #2
    Surface metal/non-metal · Skamania County · MSHA ID 4502677
    Abandoned
  17. Lost Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Chelatchie Rock Products · MSHA ID 4502594
    Abandoned
  18. Lucky Break Mine
    Underground metal/non-metal · Lucky Break Mining Company · MSHA ID 4502963
    Abandoned
  19. Mann Butte Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · U S Forest Service · MSHA ID 4502354
    Abandoned
  20. Pipeline Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Tuss Crushing Company · MSHA ID 4502818
    Abandoned
  21. Portable Crusher Unit #1
    Surface metal/non-metal · Howell Truck Service · MSHA ID 4503302
    Abandoned
  22. Portable Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · Alpha Ready Mix · MSHA ID 4503804
    Abandoned
  23. Portable Rock Crusher
    Surface metal/non-metal · Grove Crushing Company · MSHA ID 4503195
    Abandoned
  24. Portable Screen Plant
    Surface metal/non-metal · American Crushing & Recycling · MSHA ID 4503579
    Abandoned
  25. Rock Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Howell Truck Service · MSHA ID 4502344
    Abandoned
  26. Rock Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Rock Pit · MSHA ID 4503776
    Abandoned
  27. Rocky Point Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · U S Forest Service · MSHA ID 4502353
    Abandoned
  28. Ryan Lake Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Ellensburg Cement Products Inc · MSHA ID 4502952
    Abandoned
  29. Siouxon Quarry
    Surface metal/non-metal · Carson Crushing Company Inc · MSHA ID 4502210
    Abandoned
  30. Upper Houserock Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · U S Forest Service · MSHA ID 4502209
    Abandoned
  31. Wilkins-Lundy Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Wilkins & Lundy · MSHA ID 4502534
    Abandoned
  32. Willson Barnes Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Robert W Barnes · MSHA ID 4502348
    Abandoned
  33. Wind Mountain Pit
    Surface metal/non-metal · Stevenson Co-Ply Inc · MSHA ID 4502340
    Abandoned
  34. Wind River Mine
    Underground metal/non-metal · Foster Mining Company · MSHA ID 4502289
    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
Borrow Pit 70
Gravel Pit 46
Adit 22
Borrow Pit 19
Quarry 12
Prospect Pit 7
Open Pit Mine or Quarry 6
Gravel Pit 5
Mine 1
Open Pit Mine 1
Mine Shaft 1
Gravel/Borrow Pit - Undifferentiated 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.