States · Montana
Montana: every county, ranked.
The State Screen scores all 56 counties in Montana from 0 to 100 against each other on the four things a homestead can't do without: water, privacy, hazard exposure and access. Nothing is screened out.
Top five counties
- Richland County
- Dawson County
- Roosevelt County
- Teton County
- Sheridan County
In order, without their scores. Every county's score, its four sub-scores and the raw numbers behind them are in the free map.
Free for an email address: a Google Earth file with every county clickable.
What the map says about Montana
Montana is dry country: the median county gets 16 inches of rain a year, so a homestead here mostly lives or dies by its well.
Across the 54 counties with enough wells on record, the typical well is 97 ft deep. In 69% of those counties the median well is 150 ft or shallower; in 4% it is 400 ft or more.
The hazard that scores worst most often is landslide, in 28 of 56 counties.
Every county in Montana sits outside the metro commuting rings, and the median one is 46 miles from a town of 5,000.
These are counties, not parcels. A good score says the region has the water, the quiet and the hazard profile; it says nothing about a particular piece of land's flood zone, access or water source.
Then make it yours
The State Screen is one opinion of what matters. The complete map is 35 layers you switch on and off to suit your own search — wildfire, water rights, radon, well depth, state gun and homeschool law, distance from the cities, military sites and more — across the US, Canada and Mexico.