Temperatures that require three digits to express.

Wildfire acreages that take up six.

I’ve never experienced a July in Baker County that rivals this one for sheer thermal trouble.

Based on the available statistics, I don’t believe anyone else has either.

The month’s two milestones are of course related.

Intimately.

The unprecedented heat wave that arrived the day after Independence Day, and hunkered down for nearly three weeks, supplied one of the ingredients that contributed to the terrible rash of combustion.

The Durkee Fire, sparked by lightning on July 17, rode the wind for better than 20 miles, flames feasting on cheatgrass and sage and juniper so starved of moisture they might have been confined to a kiln.

Each day for a week the acres accumulated, the numbers almost as incomprehensible to me as the tickers that display the national debt or the world’s population.

Nine years ago this August, when the Cornet-Windy Ridge Fire was chewing through forest and range along the divide between the Powder and Burnt rivers, I thought that lightning-sparked blaze’s final colossal toll of 104,000 acres would reign for decades.

The Durkee Fire put paid to that idea.

(It’s not clear yet how many of the fire’s 284,000 or so acres, as of July 25, are within Baker County, as the fire has also scorched a swath of Malheur County. But based on the maps, it looks all but certain that the Durkee Fire has burned more acres in Baker County than the Cornet-Windy Ridge Fire, which stayed within Baker County, did.)

The Durkee Fire has demonstrated the combustible power of extreme heat, persistent wind and rangeland with tall grass nourished by rain last year and this spring but quickly cured under the July sun.

(June didn’t help, either. On average the second-wettest month in Baker County, this year the month was parched, the second-driest on record at the Baker City Airport.)

The weather finally tempered its malevolence on July 24.

But even then it wasn’t wholly beneficial.

A series of thunderstorms first brought gale-force winds that propelled the fire across Interstate 84 and across the Burnt River west of Durkee.

The storms also bristled with lightning bolts, some of which ignited new blazes.

But these dangerous developments were accompanied by the one thing firefighters, and the many residents whose properties are imperiled, had been pining for.

Rain.

Amounts varied, as they usually due in thunderstorms, but most of the fire got wet.

In some places rainfall totaled a half inch or so.

One storm doesn’t douse a fire the size of Multnomah County, to be sure.

But the moisture had immediate benefits, among them persuading the Baker County Sheriff’s Office to lower the evacuation level for Huntington from Level 3 — leave now — to Level 1 — be ready.

That’s a significant improvement for the 510 or so residents in Huntington, who two weeks earlier had to worry about another wildfire, a human-caused blaze that started on the east side of the town and spread east to Farewell Bend State Park.

For all the numbers associated with the Durkee Fire, and the Badlands Complex of fires ignited by lightning north of the freeway on July 22, is this one — zero.

As of July 25, officials said there were no reports of any homes being burned.

This is a testament to the efforts of residents, volunteers from the many local fire districts and rangeland protection associations, and local, state and federal agencies.

The damage, though, is immense.

And long after residents cease fearing the aroma of distant smoke, or a telltale white smudge on the next ridge over, they will be tallying the costs.

Tens of thousands of acres of rangeland where cattle graze every spring, summer and fall won’t produce enough forage for an unknown period.

If enough rain falls this autumn, a new crop of grass could return relatively soon.

But fences must be rebuilt.

And corrals and barns and other outbuildings.

More acutely, ranchers have to first collect their cattle, and then figure out where to pasture them the rest of the summer and into the fall.

None of these tasks is easy.

Or cheap.

But those affected will overcome this just as they have overcome other ordeals — the winter blizzards and past fires and floods and the other natural events that people in the beef business have confronted for decades in maintaining the industry that is a mainstay of Baker County’s economy.