A converted jet airliner dropped fire retardant on the Daybreak Ranch along Hibbard Creek Road on July 15, 2025. A firefighter credited the aerial attack with saving this and potentially other homes. (Buzz Harper/Contributed Photo)

Baker County’s biggest wildfire of 2025 didn’t damage any buildings, but a firefighter said the situation likely would have been more dire, and costly, if not for an aerial bombardment of thousands of gallons of fire retardant and water.

“If it wasn’t for the air show, there was no way we would have caught it,” Buzz Harper, chief of the Keating Rural Fire District, said on Wednesday morning, July 16. “They were like buzzards in the sky out there.”

The Daybreak Fire, which started Tuesday afternoon when a tractor caught fire along Hibbard Creek Road, about 12 miles north of Huntington and just west of Brownlee Reservoir, burned 851 acres.

The blaze was officially 40% contained Tuesday night, but Harper said it was pretty much under control by nightfall.

Fire crews were mopping up hot spots Wednesday morning.

Harper, who was stationed along Hibbard Creek, said a retardant drop from a converted jet airliner likely saved a home and several outbuildings at the Daybreak Ranch, for which the blaze was named.

The ranch is along Hibbard Creek about half a mile west of the Snake River Road, the gravel county road that connects Huntington and Richland.

The MD-87 jet, which can carry up to 3,000 gallons of retardant, created a swath that covered the roof of a hay barn so thoroughly that it appeared the structure had been painted pink on purpose.

On all sides of the retardant path, flames left a black landscape after wind gusts to 20 mph propelled flames rapidly through grass and sagebrush desiccated by the driest spring in Baker County since at least World War II.

“With that wind there was nothing we could really do,” Harper said. “It kept jumping 25-foot roads. It was just crazy there for a while.”

Harper said firefighters from several agencies “did an awesome job.”

The list includes the Keating and Huntington rural fire districts, Burnt River, Lookout/Glasgow and Vale rangeland fire protection associations, BLM, Forest Service and Oregon Department of Forestry.

Harper said a bulldozer operator, whose name he didn’t know, drove the machine in steep, dangerous terrain to carve firelines.

Harper was among a group of firefighters who helped rescue a horse that escaped the fire. He said the brown horse had some burns, and its tail was mostly singed off. He said Baker County Sheriff Travis Ash arranged to have a horse trailer brought in to take the horse for treatment.

Harper said he saw a second horse, this one white, run through the fire but he didn’t see it again and doesn’t know its fate.