Golden Valley Colony, MT
Golden Valley Colony wildfire risk explained
Out of every US place USFS scores, Golden Valley Colony lands at the 60th percentile for wildfire risk to structures — well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a figure built from its 37 buildings, not the land around them. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Golden Valley Colony at the 57th national percentile — 4 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Golden Valley Colony's building exposure, zone by zone
Most of Golden Valley Colony's buildings (78.4%) 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.
How Golden Valley Colony compares
Golden Valley Colony's 60th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 25th ranking inside Montana does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 35 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Golden Valley Colony ranks 12,550 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 31,238 by building count (1 is largest). Within Montana alone, it ranks 355 of 475 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Montana on its state page.
Golden Valley Colony and the insurance market
Golden Valley Colony's 60th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Golden Valley Colony's 78.4% 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.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Golden Valley Colony's 12,550-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Golden Valley Colony, see the exposure-zones guide.