Montane regions throughout western North America have experienced closures of forest cover and increases of forest encroachment into grasslands due to climate change and fire suppression. These changes could potentially increase probabilities of intense wildfire. A proposed solution has been the restoration of landscapes to historical conditions. We used historical photographs of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada to determine the vegetation distribution in 1909 and evaluate these changes in vegetation would influence fire. We calculated the overall and high-intensity burn probabilities in two scenarios: the baseline and historical restoration. In the baseline, the landscape had 50% less grassland and more coniferous forest than 100 years ago. The historical restoration scenario reduced the overall burn probability by 1.3%, but the probability of high-intensity wildfires was reduced by 44.2% compared to the baseline scenario. The results indicate that restoration to historical vegetation structure significantly lowered wildfire risk.