Pleasant Valley Colony, MT
Pleasant Valley Colony wildfire risk explained
Pleasant Valley Colony's 22 buildings earn a 49th-percentile wildfire-risk score nationally under USFS's model — modestly above the national average for wildfire risk. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Pleasant Valley Colony's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 48th percentile nationally.
Where Pleasant Valley Colony's buildings actually sit
Most of Pleasant Valley Colony's buildings (95.5%) 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. This is a small settlement by building count — 22 total — so these shares describe a handful of structures, not a statistical average across thousands.
Pleasant Valley Colony against the rest of the country
Inside Montana, Pleasant Valley Colony sits at just the 12th percentile even though it scores 49th 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, Pleasant Valley Colony ranks 16,107 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 31,443 by building count (1 is largest). Within Montana alone, it ranks 417 of 475 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Montana on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Pleasant Valley Colony's elevated wildfire rating (49th 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.
What would actually reduce this score
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Pleasant Valley Colony (95.5% Indirect), vent screens and roofing material tend to matter more than lot clearing alone. The home-hardening guide covers both.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Pleasant Valley Colony's 16,107-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. At 22 buildings, Pleasant Valley Colony is close to the size where USFS's data gets thin — the data-quality guide explains why 517 places nationally get no score at all.