Crested Butte, CO
Crested Butte, CO's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Crested Butte at the 69th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 1,160 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Crested Butte's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 61st percentile nationally.
Crested Butte's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Crested Butte's buildings (80.2%) sit in the Indirect zone, where wind-blown embers rather than flame front are the mechanism USFS is scoring — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing are the interventions this pattern favors, more than defensible space alone.
Crested Butte against the rest of the country
Inside Colorado, Crested Butte sits at just the 36th percentile even though it scores 69th nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Crested Butte ranks 9,824 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 10,887 by building count (1 is largest). Within Colorado alone, it ranks 305 of 472 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Colorado on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Crested Butte
Crested Butte's 69th-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 Crested Butte
Because 80.2% of Crested Butte's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
Where Crested Butte's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 1,160 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Crested Butte. The exposure-zones guide covers what Crested Butte's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.