Beaver Creek, MT
Beaver Creek wildfire risk explained
USFS scores Beaver Creek at the 61st national percentile for wildfire risk to structures (well above the national norm for wildfire risk), a figure built from 271 real buildings rather than raw vegetation cover. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Beaver Creek at the 57th percentile, close to its 61st-percentile risk score.
Where Beaver Creek's buildings actually sit
271 buildings are counted in Beaver Creek, and 87.5% of them sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone — flame contact, not just ember cast, is the live possibility for most of them, against 0% rated Minimal.
How Beaver Creek compares
Beaver Creek ranks lower within Montana (26th percentile statewide) than its 61st national percentile suggests alone — a calmer spot in a state where wildfire risk generally runs high. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Beaver Creek ranks 12,453 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 22,475 by building count (1 is largest). Within Montana alone, it ranks 354 of 475 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Montana on its state page.
Beaver Creek and the insurance market
Beaver Creek's 61st-percentile, high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
Hardening a home in Beaver Creek
Beaver Creek's 87.5% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Beaver Creek's 61st-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Beaver Creek, see the exposure-zones guide.