The hottest June on record was bone-dry. The thermometer reached its yearly high at 116 degrees on June 20, just short of the record of 117 . There were seven 110-degree or higher days this year.

Conditions were ripe for wildfires. By the end of the year, more than 125,000 acres of Arizona land burned under 83 fires, both natural and man-made, not including prescribed fires, said Heidi Schewel, public affairs specialist for Coronado National Forest.

Every mountaintop telescope in Southern Arizona was at least potentially threatened by blazes. Residents evacuated when the Dragoon and Lizard fires merged in Cochise County.

“Wildfire season is now 12 months of the year,” Schewel said. “I looked as far back as January 2016. We’ve had a wildfire every month since then.”

Then came the “blessed July,” Michael Crimmins said, which brought 6.8 inches of rain in the last three weeks of the month, more rain than the average entire monsoon season. But the 8.57 inches of total monsoon rain, 0.05 of an inch short of breaking the Top 10 wettest, could be both a blessing and a curse.

The short-lived monsoon was followed by slightly more than half an inch by the year’s end and the warmest fall on record, drying out much of the vegetation produced in July.