The air at the house is already noticeably hazy right now, and two uncontained fires sit about 14 and 19 miles to the south — on the same side of the mountain as you, so Mt Hood shields nothing. The most likely weekend is smoky-smelling but breathable, roughly what a phone app calls 'Moderate' — think orange sun, hazy ridgelines, most people fine and sensitive people noticing it, with the worst air overnight and in the morning before the valley mixes out.
The thing that would wreck the weekend, an east wind pushing dense smoke over the crest, is the one thing the models are confidently saying won't happen.
If we ran this weekend 100 times, here is how they would split. Hover a row to pick it out of the dots.
| 1 in 1013% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp against a blue sky, no smell of smoke, normal deck-and-river weekend. | nothing |
| 5 in 1051% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky sky, faint campfire smell strongest at breakfast, ridges across the valley soft-edged, Hood visible but washed out. Everyone can hike; one or two people cough. | Move the long hike to mid-afternoon when the valley has mixed out, sleep with windows shut. |
| 2 in 1024% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 One morning you wake to a grey-brown valley, sun a dull orange disk, obvious smoke smell indoors, eyes stinging on the porch. The other two days are merely hazy. | That day becomes an indoor day: masks for anyone going outside, a HEPA box running in the main room, no running or long hikes, drive to Portland if anyone is asthmatic. |
| 1 in 1013% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Can't see across the Sandy River valley, ash flecks on car hoods, smoke smell inside even with doors shut, headaches by evening. Air-quality alerts on phones. | Cut the trip short or relocate west of Sandy; anyone with asthma or a kid should leave rather than wait it out. |
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 (1,981 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 — Austin Aug 24 · The Narrows Aug 26. The oldest is Austin, 1 day behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Aug 26, 4:52 AM, 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 worse (+43 on the likely worst day) across 17 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 framing in the evidence that Mt Hood sits between the house and the fires is wrong for the fires that matter: The Narrows is at bearing 208° (13.9 mi SSW) and Austin is due south at 18.6 mi, both on the west slope with the Sandy–Zigzag drainage open to them, and both at 0% containment. The east-side fires that terrain would shield — Grasshopper (ESE, 76% contained) and WEST 8 — are also the ones that need offshore flow to reach you, and the ensembles are near-unanimous that offshore flow isn't coming (3% of member-days vs 31% climatologically, a −28 point departure across 156 member-days and two model families). So the classic Cascade smoke disaster, an east-wind event pushing a dense plume over the crest, is genuinely off the table this weekend, and I've priced it near zero. What remains is the quieter and more likely mechanism, and it's the one already producing 70 at the monitor: light and variable flow, patchy fog, and a nocturnal inversion mean the same pattern that blocks east wind also gives almost no ventilation, so smoke from the two southern fires drains into the valley overnight and takes until afternoon to mix out. Late August in a record drought year with fuels fully cured and PL 5 nationally means neither southern fire is going out on its own — there is no rain in the forecast and Oregon fires this size routinely burn into late September — so the source stays lit for the whole trip. The two-day lead time is short enough that a new close ignition is a minor rather than major worry, and it also means today's 70 is a much better anchor than any base rate.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 15 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 20 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 14.
We are forecasting a worst day of 85, 70 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 13.9 mi | The Narrows SSW | 281 acres · 0% contained |
| 18.6 mi | Austin S | 7,393 acres · 0% contained |
| 22.2 mi | Grasshopper ESE | size not yet reported |
| 37.0 mi | High Lava N | 1,981 acres · 25% contained |
| 41.7 mi | West 8 ENE | size not yet reported |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 90% contained |
| 49.5 mi | Beachcomb SSE | 2,346 acres · 100% contained |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 2 of the nearby fires (Grasshopper, 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 | 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 | 18 / 15 | 8 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 102 mi · Austin |
| Cannon Beach coast | 22 / 19 | 8 Clear | Good | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Hood River east of crest | 22 / 15 | 19 Clear | Moderate | – steady | 29 mi · High Lava |
| Manzanita coast | 24 / 22 | 8 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 24 / 21 | 8 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Astoria coast | 24 / 21 | 14 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 27 / 24 | 14 Clear | — | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 29 / 21 | 9 Clear | Moderate | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Silver Falls valley | 50 / 37 | 11 Clear | Moderate | ▼ clearing | 31 mi · Austin |
| Portland valley | 54 / 44 | 51 Hazy | Moderate | ▼ clearing | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 56 / 40 | 9 Clear | Moderate | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 123 / 72 | 80 Hazy | Moderate | – steady | 22 mi · Akawa Butte |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 08/26/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 08/26/26 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 2026-08-30 | 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 26 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 (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 28, 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 55 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 am forecasting the highest 24-hour-average US AQI for PM2.5 that touches any one of August 28, 29, or 30, 2026 at the Welches house — the single worst day of the three, not the average across them — expressed on the local monitor scale that a phone air-quality app would display (the evidence's numbers are already calibrated from the raw model scale by the 0.25 factor, and I applied no further correction of my own).”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.