Clean air stays possible right up to the trip, so the floor of the range hardly changes. What waiting buys is ruling out the bad tail — and that is the only part that would change anyone's plans.
The framing that Mt Hood shields the house is wrong for this fire complex: Mitchell (12.6 mi S), The Narrows (13.7 mi SSW), Austin (20.2 mi S) and Thomas Creek (34 mi WSW) are all on the west slope or in the valley, with no ridge between them and the Sandy/Zigzag drainage, so smoke does not need an east-wind reversal to reach the house — nocturnal down-valley drainage and light-wind stagnation can pool it locally, and the daily MAXIMUM (usually a 5-9am spike) is exactly the metric that captures that.
The framing that Mt Hood shields the house is wrong for this fire complex: Mitchell (12.6 mi S), The Narrows (13.7 mi SSW), Austin (20.2 mi S) and Thomas Creek (34 mi WSW) are all on the west slope or in the valley, with no ridge between them and the Sandy/Zigzag drainage, so smoke does not need an east-wind reversal to reach the house — nocturnal down-valley drainage and light-wind stagnation can pool it locally, and the daily MAXIMUM (usually a 5-9am spike) is exactly the metric that captures that. Cascade fires of this vintage almost never go out in August; Grasshopper at 23% containment and several uncontained neighbors will still be producing smoke on Aug 28-30, and in a season already running 1.43x normal they will be 18 days larger, with dry-lightning ignitions plausible inside that window. Against that, the dominant late-August regime here is onshore/NW marine flow, which is why today reads AQI 11 with fires 12 miles away and why the 2022-2025 trip-date means are only 16-25 — so the modal trip day is still Good-to-Moderate, and I keep p10 near the clean baseline. I therefore shift the median roughly 2x above climatology (proximity plus season anomaly, partly offset by the CAMS high bias implied by the 34-vs-11 calibration) and fatten the upper tail hard, because one offshore/east-wind event or a single blowup during a 3-day window puts the average daily max into the 100
Fire perimeters from NIFC, evacuation zones from Oregon OEM, weather and alerts from NWS, air quality from AirNow. The trip estimate is judged by Claude Opus 5 on the live data above, sampled 3 times — a judgement, never scored against an outcome, so trust the range more than the midpoint. Distances are to the nearest burned edge where a perimeter exists.
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority —
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.