Where are the abandoned mines?
If you were to draw a circle that reaches thirty miles from the center of Wickenburg you will have defined an area containing hundreds of abandoned mine workings on BLM land, the Prescott National Forest, State Trust land and private deeded land that began as patented mining claims. In some cases the patented claims continue as “non-producing” mines with no active plans by owners to reopen them. In other cases the primary land use has shifted to ranching or investment. Consulting modern U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) maps is not an effective way of determining the location of abandoned mines. Many of the old mines were opened and then closed between the earliest USGS publication date of 1885 and the most recent map editions in our area. Furthermore, mines that might have been identified on one map edition may have been removed in subsequent publications for safety reasons. The ASMI’s web site contains a modest sense of where, but not how many, mines have been identified; but this still
