Mountain Lake, MN
Mountain Lake wildfire risk explained
Mountain Lake's 1,067 buildings earn a 14th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — among the lower wildfire-risk places nationally. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Mountain Lake at the 10th national percentile — 3 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
Where Mountain Lake's buildings actually sit
USFS classifies 66.8% of Mountain Lake's buildings as Minimal exposure, the largest of the three zones here by a wide margin over 33.2% Direct and 0% Indirect — a landscape-level risk rather than a building-by-building one.
How Mountain Lake compares
There's little gap between Mountain Lake's 14th national percentile and its 18th percentile inside Minnesota, which means the state comparison mostly confirms what the national score already shows. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Mountain Lake ranks 27,233 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 11,477 by building count (1 is largest). Within Minnesota alone, it ranks 753 of 914 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Minnesota on its state page.
Shopping for coverage in Mountain Lake
Mountain Lake's low wildfire rating (14th percentile) isn't the kind of score driving the carrier pullback making news in the highest-risk Western markets — but a standard homeowners quote is still worth comparing on its own terms.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Even with 66.8% of Mountain Lake outside USFS's Direct and Indirect zones, basic hardening — gutter maintenance, ember-resistant vents — is inexpensive relative to the regional burn-probability risk noted above. Details in the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Mountain Lake's 14th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what minimal exposure implies beyond Mountain Lake, see the exposure-zones guide.