Fires are burning on three sides of this house right now — a very large one east over the pass, two in the Clackamas country to the south, and a small one to the west — and none of them will be out in two weeks. The most likely version of your weekend is visible haze and a woodsmoke smell, somewhere in the mid-80s on the scale your phone shows, which is unpleasant but not dangerous for healthy adults.
Roughly one weekend in five like this one tips into a real smoke episode where you'd want the doors shut and the filters running, and that is what you pack for.
If we ran this weekend 100 times, here is how they would split. Hover a row to pick it out of the dots.
| 2 in 1015% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 You can see Mt Hood sharply from the highway, no smell, kids outside all day, sunsets are normal-colored. | nothing |
| 4 in 1041% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the ridgelines a few miles off look flat and gray, faint campfire smell in the morning that burns off by noon; healthy adults hike, one or two people get scratchy eyes. | Run purifiers in the sleeping rooms overnight, do the long hike in the afternoon rather than at dawn, and anyone with asthma keeps their inhaler on them. |
| 3 in 1026% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Sun is an orange disc you can look at, the far side of the valley disappears, smell indoors even with windows shut, throat irritation for most of the group by evening. | Swap outdoor plans for indoor ones on the bad day, close up the house and run filtration on high, N95s for the drive and any time outside, and anyone with asthma or a heart condition stays in. |
| 2 in 1018% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Visibility under a mile, headlights on at midday, ash flecks on car hoods, everyone coughing, the house smells like smoke no matter what you do. | The trip becomes an indoor trip or you leave early; sensitive people should not come at all; watch Clackamas County evacuation levels and keep the cars pointed downhill with gas in them. |
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. Outlines flown — Grasshopper Aug 11 · Austin Aug 10 · Mitchell Aug 9 · The Narrows Aug 8. The oldest is The Narrows, 5 days behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Aug 13, 8:12 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 worse (+49 on the likely worst day) across 5 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 |
| now | 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 |
Mt Hood does not shield this house from everything: Grasshopper is 17 miles east across the crest, but Mitchell (12.5 mi), The Narrows (14 mi), and Austin (19 mi, 0% contained) are all south and Regan Hill is 17.8 miles west — those need no crest-crossing at all. Grasshopper at 85,087 acres and 20% containment on Aug 14 will not be out by Aug 30; Oregon fires that size in a record-drought year keep producing smoke until the first real frontal rain, which typically arrives mid-to-late September on the west slope, not August. The default state for a west-slope address is clean onshore marine flow, which is why the 4-year base rate here shows only 3.6% of days over 100 in this window — but the two mechanisms that break it are both live: nocturnal downvalley drainage that pulls east-side smoke through the Government Camp gap and pools it in the Sandy valley (that is most likely what is producing the 89 at Multorpor right now under fog and near-calm winds), and a multi-day offshore east-wind event, which is the 2020-style tail. The season is running 1.57x normal in locally measured AQI, and I applied that ratio in full rather than discounting it, because the fires driving it are still on the landscape. I did not stack an additional 'bad year' multiplier on top, but I did fatten the upper tail modestly: the local archive starts in 2022 and has never seen a catastrophic Oregon smoke year, and 14 days is long enough for a brand-new ignition closer than anything currently burning, with initial attack thin at national preparedness level 5.
A normal late August here is Hazy - median AQI 57 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 74 · 2024: 48 · 2023: 50 · 2022: 51.
We are forecasting a worst day of 91, 34 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 | 2 acres |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 85,087 acres · 20% contained |
| 17.8 mi | Regan Hill W | size not yet reported |
| 19.4 mi | Austin S | 1,527 acres · 0% contained |
| 20.4 mi | Austin Non-Stat S | size not yet reported |
| 38.9 mi | High Lava NNW | 1,211 acres · 8% contained |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 2 of the nearby fires (Regan Hill, Austin Non-Stat) 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.
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 105, 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? Accuracy checking started Aug 13. 1 forecast-day scored so far — far too few to claim anything. This is the only part of the page that can ever be proved wrong.
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 AQI for PM2.5 — a pollutant index computed from a 24-hour average particle concentration, not an instantaneous reading — taking the highest 24-hour AQI value that touches each calendar day at the Welches house, on the local monitor scale a phone app displays (already calibrated to the Multorpor station, no further bias correction applied by me), and reporting the single worst of those three daily values across Aug 28, 29, and 30, 2026.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.