First, a flag you should know about: the weekend you asked about is in the past — August 28-30 was 55 days before the data in this pack, and every live observation here (a frost advisory, light rain, fires at 90-98% contained) describes mid-October, not late August. Treating it as a genuine forecast made with late-August information, the most likely outcome at the house was a Moderate, slightly hazy weekend with a worst day around 57 on the monitor scale — noticeable in the sky and on the horizon, fine for hiking and sitting outside.
The real risk was not the average but a single bad day: roughly a 1-in-3-to-1-in-4 chance that one of the three days crossed 100, driven by an east-wind reversal or nighttime drainage off the two fires burning south of you on your own side of the mountains.
If we ran this weekend 100 times, here is how they would split. Hover a row to pick it out of the dots.
| 3 in 1034% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp-edged all three days, blue sky to the ridgelines, cool damp mornings off the marine layer, no smell of smoke on the deck at night. | nothing |
| 4 in 1038% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the far ridges flattened into gray layers, an orange-ish sunset, a faint campfire smell in the valley at dawn that burns off by 10am. Nobody's eyes hurt; the group still hikes. | Shift the long hike to the morning, run the AC on recirculate in the cars, keep windows shut overnight. |
| 2 in 1017% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 One day you can't see Hood at all from the Village, visibility down to a couple of miles down US-26, sun a dull disc, throats scratchy by afternoon. The other two days are merely hazy. | Indoor day: board games, Sandy or Portland for the afternoon, box-fan filter in the main room, anyone with asthma stays in. |
| 1 in 1011% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Brown-gray air at ground level, ash flecks on car hoods, headlights on at midday, a sore throat within an hour outside. Possible Level 1 'be ready' notices in the Hoodland corridor. | Leave early or don't come. This is the case where the trip is not worth it for anyone with a kid, a pregnancy, or a lung condition. |
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), 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, 37 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 worse (+21 on the likely worst day) across 73 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 house sits on the west slope at 1,200 feet in the Zigzag/Sandy valley, and in late August the default pattern is onshore: a nightly marine push ventilates the west Cascade slope and carries smoke east over the crest, which is why 28 sampled days in this calendar window produced zero days over 100 and a worst observed day of 68. But the terrain argument is weaker here than it looks — I checked the bearings, and Austin (12,888 acres, bearing S) and The Narrows (bearing SSW) are both on the WEST side of the crest, upriver in the Clackamas drainage, so Mt Hood shields the house from neither; only Grasshopper at bearing 207... correction, Grasshopper at bearing E needs to cross the crest. That gives two mechanisms rather than one: a genuine offshore reversal (31% of member-days climatologically in this window, and with a null ensemble I have no evidence to push that lower) bringing Grasshopper's 94,000-acre column over the top, or merely light southerly/nocturnal drainage flow funneling Austin's smoke down the Clackamas-to-Sandy corridor into a valley that inverts hard overnight — and because the AQI is a 24-hour average, overnight pooling matters as much as the afternoon. Against that: the measured season anomaly is 1.02, essentially neutral, and the pack explicitly tells me not to stack a 'record year' multiplier on top of it, since Oregon's 2.34 million acres are dominated by east-side fires that never transport to this address.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 37 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 48 · 2024: 31 · 2023: 33 · 2022: 33.
We are forecasting a worst day of 63, 26 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 |
| 37.0 mi | High Lava N | 2,899 acres · 100% contained |
| 44.1 mi | Muddy Run RX SSE | size not yet reported |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 90% contained |
| 50.2 mi | Tule RX ESE | size not yet reported |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 2 of the nearby fires (Muddy Run RX, Tule RX) 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 |
| Newport coast | 20 / 17 | 53 Hazy | Good | – steady | 101 mi · Austin |
| Astoria coast | 21 / 18 | 21 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 22 / 19 | 21 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 23 / 17 | 34 Clear | Good | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Manzanita coast | 29 / 27 | 53 Hazy | — | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 31 / 27 | 53 Hazy | — | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 31 / 28 | 53 Hazy | — | – steady | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 42 / 28 | 52 Hazy | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Portland valley | 47 / 38 | 70 Hazy | Good | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 53 / 39 | 62 Hazy | — | – steady | 31 mi · Austin |
| McMinnville valley | 55 / 38 | 66 Hazy | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 58 / 34 | 63 Hazy | — | – steady | 36 mi · Bench |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/22/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/22/26 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 2026-10-26 | 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, 2026-10-01 to 2026-10-14 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.37 on the coast to 0.768 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Oct 22 5:00 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 (Estacada, 18.3 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 68, 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 340 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 forecasting the US EPA AQI for PM2.5 as a 24-hour average quantity — specifically the single highest 24-hour-average AQI value touching any one of the three calendar days 2026-08-28, 08-29 and 08-30, at the house in Mt Hood Village / Welches (45.320, -121.956), expressed on the local monitor scale that a phone app like AirNow would have displayed (the evidence pack already applied the 0.614 model-to-monitor factor, and I added no bias correction of my own). My headline number is the worst single day of the trip, not the three-day mean. One caveat on the scale itself: that 0.614 factor was fit at the Estacada monitor 18.3 miles away, not at the house, so there is unmodelled error in transferring it up the valley. And the honest caveat on the whole exercise: today is 2026-10-22 and these dates are 55 days in the past, so this is a hindcast of a weekend that has already happened, built from a pack whose live observations all describe October.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.