A very large fire is burning about seventeen miles east of the house and three smaller ones sit to the south on the same side of the ridge, and all of them will still be burning during your trip — but the air at the house is clean right now because ocean air is pushing inland, which is the normal late-August pattern here. Our best guess is that one of your three days looks a little hazy, with a reading in the 40s or 50s: ugly sunsets, campfire smell, nothing that hurts a healthy person.
The real risk is a two-to-four day east-wind spell, which shows up maybe one weekend in five at this time of year and would funnel the east-side smoke straight down the US-26 corridor to you — and you will be able to see that coming about three days out.
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 1054% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Blue sky or low marine cloud, Mt Hood sharp in the morning, maybe a faint brown smudge on the eastern horizon at sunrise and a whiff of woodsmoke on the porch that's gone by ten. Everyone hikes, kids swim in the Salmon River. | nothing |
| 3 in 1026% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the mountain's outline soft or missing, a steady campfire smell that never clears. Sunsets go orange. Healthy adults feel nothing; the one person with asthma notices by evening. | Do the hiking before noon, keep windows shut overnight, run one purifier in whichever room the sensitive people sleep in. |
| 1 in 1012% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 One morning you can't see the ridge across the valley, everything smells like a fireplace, eyes sting on the porch, and the light stays yellow all day. The other two days are livable. | Move that one day indoors or drive west out of the valley — Portland, the Gorge's west end, the coast. No trail runs. N95s for anyone with asthma, heart trouble, or a pregnancy. |
| 1 in 108% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Two or three days of dim orange light at midday, visibility under a mile, headaches by afternoon, ash on the car. Fire traffic on US-26 and possibly a Level 1 'be ready' notice pinging phones. | Relocate the trip west of the Cascades or cut it short. Twelve people sealed in a cabin for three days is not the trip anyone booked. |
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 (1,211 acres, 38.9 mi NNW).
An outline is only as current as the last mapping flight, which is not the same as when this page refreshed. Last mapped — Grasshopper Aug 11 · Austin Aug 10 · Mitchell Aug 9 · The Narrows Aug 8. The oldest of these is The Narrows, 3 days behind.
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 (+3 on the likely worst day) across 3 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 |
| Aug 15 | ECMWF ensemble (51 members) wind direction, the sharpest ensemble · reaches 13 days out |
| Aug 13 | Deterministic weather (16-day) day-by-day wind and temperature · reaches 15 days out |
| Aug 22 | Air-quality / smoke model (CAMS) actual AQI at the house · reaches 6 days out |
Grasshopper at 78,000 acres and 20% containment on August 12 is a campaign fire; Oregon Cascade fires that size effectively never reach full containment before the first real fall rains in mid-to-late September, so it is close to certain it is still producing smoke on your dates. The reason the house reads 11 today is not the mountain — it's the marine push, W/NW flow and drizzle, and that pattern is the late-August default here, which is why four straight years of these calendar dates averaged a daily max of 10 to 16. The terrain argument people will make is wrong in a specific way worth naming: Mt Hood sits northeast of the house, while Grasshopper is due east across Barlow Pass, a 4,150 ft gap that US-26 itself runs through — and Mitchell, The Narrows, and Austin are all south of you on the same, west side of the crest with nothing in between, two of them uncontained. So the mechanism that ruins the weekend is a synoptic flip to offshore/east gradient, or a run on one of the small south-side fires, and neither is forecastable at 16 days; I'm therefore leaving the median near a hazy-but-harmless 48 and putting the weight into a fat but honest tail. New ignitions matter too — two of the fires on this list are days old and within 14 miles, and 16 more days of the driest fuels of the year is plenty of time for another one closer than any of them. The one thing keeping me from a scarier number is the averaging period: a smoky morning that clears by afternoon produces a 24-hour AQI in the 50s or 60s, not the 150 the sky looked like at 8am.
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 45, 33 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 12.5 mi | Mitchell S | 16 acres |
| 14.0 mi | The Narrows SSW | 5 acres |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 78,011 acres · 20% contained |
| 19.8 mi | Austin S | 719 acres · 0% contained |
| 27.1 mi | Gorton Creek NNE | size not yet reported |
| 38.9 mi | High Lava NNW | 1,211 acres · 0% contained |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 86% contained |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 1 of the nearby fires (Gorton Creek) 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 | 14.3 mi |
Distance from each point on the drive in to the nearest fire. TripCheck is the authority on closures.
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.
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 quantity — specifically, for each calendar day of the trip, the highest 24-hour-average AQI value overlapping that day, measured at the house in Welches, on the local monitor scale a phone app displays (the evidence pack's numbers are already bias-corrected and I applied no further correction). The headline numbers describe the single worst of the three days, 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.