Steamboat Springs, CO
How exposed is Steamboat Springs to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Steamboat Springs at the 75th national percentile for risk to structures, well above the national norm for wildfire risk — a score built from 5,497 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Fire likelihood alone (USFS's burn-probability figure) ranks Steamboat Springs at the 70th national percentile — 5 points below its risk-to-structures score, a gap driven by how much is actually built there.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
68% of Steamboat Springs's 5,497 buildings fall in USFS's Indirect exposure zone — ember cast rather than direct flame — against 32% Direct and 0% Minimal. Vent screens and roofing material matter more here than lot clearing alone. At 5,497 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
Steamboat Springs against the rest of the country
Steamboat Springs's 75th national percentile looks worse in isolation than its 45th ranking inside Colorado does — this place is on the milder end for its own state, by 30 points. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Steamboat Springs ranks 7,870 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 3,138 by building count (1 is largest). Within Colorado alone, it ranks 261 of 472 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Colorado on its state page.
Steamboat Springs and the insurance market
Steamboat Springs's 75th-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 Steamboat Springs
Because 68% of Steamboat Springs'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 Steamboat Springs's figures come from
Every one of the two percentiles behind Steamboat Springs's 7,870-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. The exposure-zones guide covers what Steamboat Springs's dominant indirect exposure actually means, with real examples from across the dataset.