First, a flag: the dates you gave are August 28-30, 2026, and today is October 8, so this weekend has already happened and nothing here is a decision anymore. Looking backward at what the evidence supports, the house sits on the wet west slope with three fires 14-18 miles out, two of them on the same side of the crest as the house, so the likeliest outcome was visible haze and a smoky smell on one morning rather than a stay-indoors weekend.
The realistic bad case was a single day in the orange range from the Austin fire to the south, with roughly a one-in-four chance any day of the three crossed into unhealthy-for-sensitive-groups territory.
If we ran this weekend 100 times, here is how they would split. Hover a row to pick it out of the dots.
| 5 in 1052% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp against blue sky from the Villages, no smell of smoke, kids outside all day, phone app reads Good or low Moderate. | nothing |
| 3 in 1028% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, Hood softened to a silhouette, faint campfire smell at dawn that burns off by noon as the canyon wind turns westerly; sunsets unusually orange. | Nighttime drainage off the Clackamas pools Austin-fire smoke in the Sandy River valley overnight, then the marine push scours it out each afternoon. |
| 1 in 1013% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Ridge across the highway invisible, eyes sting, smoke smell all day not just morning, people with asthma noticeably bothered; one of the three days clearly worse than the others. | A thermal trough or weak offshore gradient kills the marine push for 24-36 hours and holds light southerly or easterly flow, aiming Austin or Grasshopper smoke straight down-drainage at Welches. |
| 1 in 107% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Brown-orange daylight, headlights on at midday, indoor air hazy, trip effectively over as an outdoor trip; possible Level 1 'Be Ready' notice somewhere in the corridor. | Either a sustained east-wind event pushes the 94,000-acre Grasshopper plume over the crest, or a new ignition starts inside 15 miles on the west slope and runs in fully cured fuels with initial attack short-handed at national Preparedness Level 5. |
Fires near the house, drawn at their real shape from the federal perimeter data, over USGS terrain. Dashed rings are distance from the house; the shaded wedge is the only direction an east wind could carry smoke here from. Point at a fire for its details.
Solid dots are fires too small to draw at this scale but whose size is known. A dashed circle would mean a fire that has been located but has no published perimeter - size unknown, not small.
Beyond this frame, and too far to threaten the house but close enough to add regional haze: High Lava (2,899 acres, 37.0 mi N).
An outline is only as current as the last mapping flight, which is not the same as when this page refreshed. Outlines flown — Grasshopper Sep 15 · Austin Sep 16 · The Narrows Sep 15. The oldest is The Narrows, 23 days behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Sep 29, 4:26 PM, so a fire may already be larger than the shape drawn for it.
Terrain: USGS 3DEP (public domain). Roads and water: © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL). Fire perimeters: NIFC.
Want to check it yourself, or see the rest of the state? The Oregonian's wildfire tracker is live and updates every 15 minutes.
Long-range wind signal unavailable this run.
It is not one cut-off. Five sources arrive on five different dates, and the darker the strip, the more of them cover your weekend. Hover any day for the count.
▼ Since 2026-08-10 the forecast has moved better (-6 on the likely worst day) across 59 daily updates. Shading above shows source coverage, not this movement - hover a past day to see what we said that morning.
| now | Fire size & containment how big the fires are and whether they are being held |
| now | Long-range ensembles (GEFS 0.5 + GEM) wind direction, 52 members · reaches 32 days out |
| now | ECMWF ensemble (51 members) wind direction, the sharpest ensemble · reaches 13 days out |
| now | Deterministic weather (16-day) day-by-day wind and temperature · reaches 15 days out |
| now | Air-quality / smoke model (CAMS) actual AQI at the house · reaches 6 days out |
The controlling mechanism at this address is not the Mt Hood crest, it is whether the Pacific marine push holds: the house sits on the west slope where the default airmass arrives from the ocean, upwind of every fire in the pack. I checked the bearings rather than assuming terrain shielding, and two fires are on the house's own side of the crest — The Narrows at 207 degrees and roughly 45.14N/-122.08W, and Austin 18 miles south at 12,888 acres — so the bad case does not require crossing Mt Hood at all, only a day of light southerly flow plus overnight canyon drainage. Grasshopper's 93,971 acres 17 miles east is the biggest source but needs a genuine offshore event to reach the house, and it read 98% contained by mid-September, which means late August was its active phase but also that it was on a containment trajectory through the window. The east-wind field gives me no departure signal to lean on: the ensemble is null, so I have only the 31% climatological offshore rate for this window, and I decline to read that absolute percentage as a chance of smoke. Against the 12-AQI median anchor I apply a 3.75x multiplier for the worst day, which lands the median at 45 — right at the climatological p90 — because the 2022-2025 archive that produced 0 of 28 days over 100 never contained a configuration like this one, and because the archive starts in 2022 and has never seen a 2020-class year, so the upper tail is under-sampled rather than measured.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 12 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 16 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 11.
We are forecasting a worst day of 36, 24 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 13.9 mi | The Narrows SSW | 304 acres · 98% contained |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,971 acres · 98% contained |
| 18.3 mi | Austin S | 12,888 acres · 98% contained |
| 32.4 mi | Triple Butte RX SSE | size not yet reported |
| 37.0 mi | High Lava N | 2,899 acres · 90% contained |
| 51.5 mi | George St SE | size not yet reported |
| 53.8 mi | Celilo Park ENE | size not yet reported |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 3 of the nearby fires (Triple Butte RX, George St, Celilo Park) have no size reported yet. Whether those are 300-acre creepers or 20,000-acre runners is most of the answer.
If the weekend is clean you carried masks for nothing. If it is not, this is the difference between a bad weekend and a ruined one.
| Sandy | 19.4 mi |
| Brightwood | 15.5 mi |
| Welches | 14.8 mi |
Distance from each point on the drive in to the nearest fire. TripCheck is the authority on closures.
Ranked by how bad these dates have historically been at each place. The coast is not just cleaner today — it sits upwind of everything burning, so it only smokes during an east-wind reversal, which is the same event that would smoke out the house.
| Place | Bad day / typical | Now | Official forecast | Next 5 days | Nearest fire |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 20 / 15 | 10 Clear | Good | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Newport coast | 20 / 17 | 15 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 101 mi · Austin |
| Astoria coast | 25 / 22 | 19 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 25 / 22 | 19 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Manzanita coast | 26 / 24 | 21 Clear | — | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 28 / 24 | 21 Clear | — | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 29 / 26 | 21 Clear | — | – steady | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 40 / 26 | 29 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| McMinnville valley | 45 / 32 | 47 Clear | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Portland valley | 46 / 37 | 53 Hazy | Good | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 49 / 36 | 49 Clear | — | – steady | 31 mi · Austin |
| Bend east of crest | 56 / 33 | 28 Clear | — | ▼ clearing | 35 mi · Crosswhite |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/08/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/08/26 by Washington Department of Ecology | Next published outlook for that reporting area — a human forecaster's call Oregon DEQ via AirNow |
| Next 5 days | today's model run, covering 2026-10-12 | Direction only. Copernicus CAMS global air-quality model open-meteo.com |
| Bad day / typical | Aug 26 – Sep 1 in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 (28 days each) | CAMS reanalysis for those exact dates, then converted to the monitor scale open-meteo.com |
| Scale conversion | median of 14 daily model-vs-monitor pairs, 2026-09-24 to 2026-10-07 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.37 on the coast to 0.694 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Oct 8 5:01 AM | Perimeter polygons of fires over 100 acres, distance to the burned edge NIFC WFIGS |
Every AQI figure above is on the ground-monitor scale — the same thing your phone shows. n/a means the model and the monitors disagree so sharply at that spot that we cannot honestly place it on that scale (steep terrain inside a coarse model grid cell — the Gorge is the usual culprit); those rows are sorted by today’s reading instead.
Fire perimeters from NIFC, evacuation zones from Oregon OEM, weather and alerts from NWS, air quality from AirNow (Multorpor, 8.7 mi away). The forecast is judged by Claude Opus 5 on the live data above, sampled 5 times and pooled conservatively.
It is a judgement, never scored against an outcome. Nobody forecasts smoke this far out: NOAA's smoke model runs 48 hours and the EPA's air-quality forecast is for tomorrow. Two-to-six weeks ahead is what meteorologists call the predictability desert. Anyone giving you a number for the trip right now - us included - is giving you a base rate with a story attached.
How thin the history is. The air-quality record for this spot begins in 2022, so "normal" here is built from just 4 years (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025). In those 28 sampled days the worst single day was AQI 22, and none reached 100.
That record has never seen a bad Oregon smoke year — not 2020, when Portland sat above AQI 500 for days, nor 2017, 2018 or 2021. So the base rate below is drawn entirely from calm years, and the upper end of our range is an estimate rather than something history has shown us. It is the main reason not to read the good news too confidently.
Are these forecasts any good? Across 270 scored forecast-days, the air-quality model beat both simple baselines at 1 of 5 lead times. Where it does not, this page should not be trusted to out-guess them either.
AQI here means the highest 24-hour PM2.5 value touching a day, at the house, on the local monitor scale - the same thing your phone shows. The model's own restatement of the target: “I am estimating the highest 24-hour-average US AQI for PM2.5 touching each calendar day at the house in Welches (45.320N, 121.956W), reported on the local monitor scale that a phone app would show — already calibrated from the model scale, with no further bias correction of my own — and the worst_day_of_trip figures are the distribution of the single worst of the three days, not the average across them.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.