Wise River, MT
How exposed is Wise River to wildfire?
USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model puts Wise River at the 88th national percentile for risk to structures, in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — a score built from 116 actual buildings. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Wise River at the 86th percentile, close to its 88th-percentile risk score.
Wise River's building exposure, zone by zone
100% of Wise River's 116 buildings sit in USFS's Direct exposure zone, roughly 116 structures close enough to burnable vegetation for flame contact, not just embers — 0% fall in the Indirect, ember-only zone and 0% are Minimal.
Wise River against the rest of the country
Inside Montana, Wise River sits at just the 71st percentile even though it scores 88th 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, Wise River ranks 3,850 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 28,368 by building count (1 is largest). Within Montana alone, it ranks 140 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
Wise River's 88th-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.
Lowering exposure, not just insuring around it
Wise River's 100% Direct-exposure share means lot clearing around the structure typically outweighs any single material upgrade here. The home-hardening guide ranks the options for a place shaped like this.
More on how this number was built
Every one of the two percentiles behind Wise River's 3,850-place national rank traces to USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities dataset — see the methodology guide. For more on what direct exposure implies beyond Wise River, see the exposure-zones guide.