THE VALLEY COUNTY LAND BRIEF
Land in the
Glaciated Northern Grasslands setting.
Valley County has 4,926.1 square miles of land in Montana. 5 mapped landscape regions meet across Valley County: Glaciated Northern Grasslands, Montana Central Grasslands, Glaciated Dark Brown Prairie, among others.
Glaciated plains bridge the wetter eastern prairie and the drier, more broken Great Plains. Numerous prairie potholes and other seasonal or persistent wetlands are characteristic regional landforms.
Regional context: Northwestern Glaciated Plains ↗ · Regional mapping across the county footprint
Where the landscape changes
Valley County intersects 5 mapped regional units. The largest mapped shares are:
- Glaciated Northern Grasslands64.4%
- Montana Central Grasslands13.5%
- Glaciated Dark Brown Prairie12.9%
- River Breaks7.6%
- Missouri Breaks Woodland-Scrubland1.6%
Northwestern Great Plains in Valley County
Rolling semiarid plains are punctuated by buttes, badlands and river breaks. Much of the regional terrain developed on sandstone, siltstone and shale without the leveling influence of continental glaciers.
Read the regional source ↗Finding your parcel within Valley County
The atlas lists 7 cities, towns, townships, and Census communities associated with Valley County, including St. Marie, Hinsdale, Frazer. The list includes overlapping geography types and does not divide the county into exclusive service areas.
Valley County by land and water
The Census records 135.7 square miles of water within Valley County, or 2.7% of its total area. That share is close to Valley County’s 2.7%. This is geographic context; waterfront status and usable land must be checked at the parcel.
For scale, Valley County has 215.1 times the land area of nearby St. Marie CDP (22.9 square miles). These areas describe boundaries, not comparable property prices.
The Census boundary meets Daniels County, Garfield County, McCone County, Phillips County, Roosevelt County within Montana. A tract near one of these lines should be matched to the county identifier on its own records.

