Gold Canyon, AZ
Gold Canyon, AZ's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Gold Canyon sits at the 92nd percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 8,237 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Gold Canyon at the 91st national percentile — 2 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Gold Canyon's buildings actually sit
Indirect exposure is dominant in Gold Canyon (66.3% of 8,237 buildings): far enough from burnable vegetation to avoid flame contact, close enough for wind-blown embers. Only 33.7% sit in the Direct zone. At 8,237 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Gold Canyon compares
Gold Canyon's 92nd national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 69th ranking inside Arizona does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 24 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Gold Canyon ranks 2,414 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,032 by building count (1 is largest). Within Arizona alone, it ranks 139 of 441 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Arizona on its state page.
Gold Canyon and the insurance market
Gold Canyon's 92nd-percentile, very 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.
What would actually reduce this score
Gold Canyon's 66.3% Indirect-exposure share points at embers, not flame contact, as the main pathway — ember-resistant vents and non-combustible roofing rank ahead of defensible space here. Detail in the home-hardening guide.
Where Gold Canyon's figures come from
The methodology guide shows exactly how USFS turned 8,237 counted buildings into the percentiles shown above for Gold Canyon. The exposure-zones guide covers what Gold Canyon's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.