The one large fire near the house is on the far side of Mt Hood, is three-quarters contained, and the east winds that would carry its smoke over the crest to you are almost entirely absent from the forecast models for your dates. The monitor eight miles from the house reads 22 right now, which is clean, and the most likely worst day of your weekend is around 30 — a little haze on the ridgelines at most.
The real thing to watch is two small, uncontained fires about thirteen to nineteen miles south of the house on your side of the mountains; if one of those makes a big run this week you could get a single hazy-to-smoky day, and that's roughly a one-in-ten shot.
If we ran this weekend 100 times, here is how they would split. Hover a row to pick it out of the dots.
| 6 in 1061% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Blue sky, maybe a milky band over the ridges in the morning that burns off; you can see Mt Hood clearly; nobody's eyes or throat notice anything. | nothing |
| 3 in 1028% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 A visible tan layer in the valley at sunrise, the mountain looks flat and washed out, and you can faintly smell campfire outside. Hiking and river time are still fine; sensitive people (asthma, the older folks, little kids) might want an easier afternoon. | Do the hike in the morning before the afternoon smoke drifts in, close the house windows overnight, run the box fan or purifier indoors. |
| 1 in 107% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Grey-orange light all day, the ridge across the highway is a silhouette, smoke smell indoors, and phones showing 'Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups.' One day of the three, most likely tied to a big afternoon fire run to the south. | Move that day indoors — cards, board games, a drive west to Sandy or Portland where the air is usually cleaner. Sensitive people mask outdoors. Trip still worth taking. |
| 0 in 104% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ You can't see the far side of the golf course, the sun is a red disc, everyone's throat is scratchy within an hour outside, and there may be fire-agency notices for the Zigzag/Welches area. | Cut the trip to one night or reschedule; if there's an evacuation notice, leave west on US-26 early rather than waiting. |
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: Bench (67,071 acres, 45.5 mi SSE), Ten Mile (4,834 acres, 56.7 mi SE), Beachcomb (2,346 acres, 49.5 mi SSE), High Lava (1,717 acres, 37.2 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 Aug 21 · Austin Aug 22 · The Narrows Aug 22 · Mitchell Aug 16. The oldest is Mitchell, 6 days behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Aug 22, 11:05 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.
The long-range ensembles show less east-wind risk than a normal year — weak evidence, but pointing the right way.
Caveat: this counts days whose dominant wind is easterly, which at a valley site also picks up ordinary overnight down-valley drainage, not only the Gorge-outflow events that actually carry smoke. Forecast and base rate are measured the same way, so the gap is the meaningful part; the absolute percentages are not a chance-of-smoke.
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 steady (-4 on the likely worst day) across 14 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 dominant smoke source in this neighborhood, the 93,562-acre Grasshopper fire, is 17 miles due east with Mt Hood between it and the house, and it is 76% contained and past its growth phase; delivering its smoke to Welches requires easterly/offshore flow, and the 156-member ensemble puts that at 1% of member-days against a 31% climatological rate for the same calendar window — a 30-point negative departure that is real evidence against the bad case, not just a restatement of a prior. What the ensemble does not cover is the local transport that is actually driving this year's elevated readings: the Austin fire (5,295 acres, 0% contained, 18.6 miles south) and The Narrows (223 acres, 0% contained, 13.9 miles south-southwest) are on the WEST side of the crest with no terrain shield, and with light southerly flow plus nightly down-valley drainage into the Sandy and Salmon River valleys, their smoke can pool at the house overnight and hold through the morning — which is exactly the mechanism that turns an afternoon whiff into an elevated 24-hour average. That mechanism is already priced in: the last 30 days at this location averaged a daily max of 21 against a typical 10, and with those same fires burning and the wind currently blowing from fire toward house, the monitor still reads 22. So I anchor on the 12 climatological median, apply 2.4x for the measured season anomaly plus the worst-of-three-days effect, and land at a worst-day median near 29 — clearly hazier than a normal late August, clearly not a trip-killer.
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 38, 26 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 12.5 mi | Mitchell S | 16 acres |
| 13.9 mi | The Narrows SSW | 223 acres · 0% contained |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,562 acres · 76% contained |
| 18.6 mi | Austin S | 5,295 acres · 0% contained |
| 19.3 mi | Sweetwater W | size not yet reported |
| 37.2 mi | High Lava N | 1,717 acres · 19% contained |
| 41.7 mi | West 8 ENE | size not yet reported |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 2 of the nearby fires (Sweetwater, West 8) 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 | 5.7 mi |
| Brightwood | 10.9 mi |
| Welches | 14.3 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 |
| Newport coast | 18 / 15 | 8 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 102 mi · The Narrows |
| Cannon Beach coast | 22 / 19 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Hood River east of crest | 22 / 15 | 16 Clear | Moderate | ▲ worsening | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Manzanita coast | 24 / 22 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 24 / 21 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Astoria coast | 24 / 21 | 14 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 27 / 24 | 14 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 29 / 21 | 10 Clear | Moderate | ▲ worsening | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Silver Falls valley | 50 / 37 | 10 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 33 mi · The Narrows |
| Portland valley | 54 / 44 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 56 / 40 | 9 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 123 / 72 | 16 Clear | Moderate | ▲ worsening | 22 mi · Akawa Butte |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 08/23/26 8:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 08/23/26 by Oregon Dept. of Environmental Quality | Next published outlook for that reporting area — a human forecaster's call Oregon DEQ via AirNow |
| Next 5 days | today's model run, covering 2026-08-27 | 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, 2026-08-08 to 2026-08-21 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.342 on the coast to 1.091 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Aug 23 8:52 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 40 scored forecast-days, the air-quality model beat both simple baselines at 4 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'm forecasting the US AQI for PM2.5 as a 24-hour average — the highest 24-hour-average value touching each calendar day at the Welches house — reported on the local monitor scale, meaning the number a phone app would show from the AirNow station at Multorpor 8.7 miles away, not a raw model value and with no further bias correction applied by me. The headline number is the worst single day of the three, Aug 28-30, not the average across them.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.