Telluride, CO
Telluride, CO's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Telluride sits at the 83rd 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 1,024 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
Separately from the risk score above, Telluride's burn probability — fire likelihood with no building count factored in — sits at the 74th percentile nationally.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS puts 84.1% of Telluride's 1,024 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 15.9% Direct and 0% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to.
How Telluride compares
Inside Colorado, Telluride sits at just the 60th percentile even though it scores 83rd 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, Telluride ranks 5,513 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 11,766 by building count (1 is largest). Within Colorado alone, it ranks 191 of 472 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Colorado on its state page.
What this risk score means for insurance
Telluride's 83rd-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
With ember exposure the dominant pattern in Telluride (84.1% 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 Telluride's 5,513-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Telluride, see the exposure-zones guide.