There is already smoke in the neighborhood and several fires are still burning within twenty miles, so the most likely weekend is a hazy one: mountains visible but soft, campfire smell in the morning, fine for most people and irritating for a few. Our best guess for the worst of your three days is about 61 on the scale your phone shows — the yellow 'Moderate' band — with roughly a one-in-three chance the whole weekend stays green and about a one-in-four chance one day goes orange or worse.
The thing that would flip it is an east wind, which would drag smoke from the big fire on the far side of Mt Hood down the valley to the house and fan the uncontained fires just south of you, and that shows up in the forecast two to three days ahead.
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 1029% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp from the deck, no smell, kids outside all day, maybe a little morning haze that burns off by ten. | nothing |
| 4 in 1042% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, orange-ish sun, faint campfire smell strongest at dawn and after dark, ridgelines soft. Most people notice nothing; one or two get scratchy eyes. | Run a purifier in the sleeping rooms, keep windows shut overnight, move the long hike to the morning. |
| 2 in 1018% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 You can taste it. Visibility a couple of miles down the Salmon River valley, sun a red disc, throat scratchy after twenty minutes outdoors, everyone checking phones. | That day becomes indoors — masks for the grocery run, no hiking or river time, purifiers on high, plan a drive west toward the coast or Portland if you want out. |
| 1 in 1012% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Streetlights on at noon, ash flecks on the car, headache within an hour outside, the house smells smoky even sealed up. Fire-camp traffic on US-26. | Leave or don't come. Drive west, not east — check ODOT TripCheck before moving, and watch the county evacuation map. |
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 (1,405 acres, 37.8 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 18 · Austin Aug 18 · The Narrows Aug 18 · Mitchell Aug 16. The oldest is Mitchell, 2 days behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Aug 19, 3:51 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 (+28 on the likely worst day) across 10 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 |
| Aug 22 | Air-quality / smoke model (CAMS) actual AQI at the house · reaches 6 days out |
The evidence pack's terrain claim is only half right: Grasshopper (92,399 acres, 57% contained, 17 miles east) is behind the crest, but Mitchell, The Narrows, and Austin sit at longitude ~-121.97 — essentially the house's own meridian, 12 to 19 miles south, on the west slope, with no terrain between them and Welches at all, and two of them at 0% containment. Right now winds are 0–2 mph, which means today's 52 at Multorpor is not transport but local accumulation and overnight valley pooling in the Salmon/Zigzag drainage — the mechanism that most often produces a Moderate 24-hour average here. Over the next nine days the source term will not go away: 92,000-acre Oregon fires smolder well into September, there is no season-ending rain in the Cascades until roughly mid-September, and PL5 nationally means the small uncontained fires south of the house have thin initial-attack resources. The default regime is onshore westerly, which ventilates this valley and is exactly why the four-year climatology is only 19 and has never touched 100 in this window — so a clean weekend is a live possibility, not a courtesy. The bad case is an offshore east gradient, which does two things at once: pushes Grasshopper's smoke down the Zigzag valley and simultaneously drives a run on the southern fires. I hold the tail wider than the archive supports because the record starts in 2022 and omits 2020, when the Riverside fire put this exact address under evacuation.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 19 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 25 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 17 · 2022: 17.
We are forecasting a worst day of 70, 51 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 | 160 acres · 0% contained |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 92,399 acres · 57% contained |
| 19.0 mi | Austin S | 3,244 acres · 0% contained |
| 20.4 mi | Austin Non-Stat S | size not yet reported |
| 37.8 mi | High Lava N | 1,405 acres · 8% contained |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 90% contained |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 1 of the nearby fires (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 | 15.6 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 | 20 / 17 | 17 Clear | Good | – steady | 102 mi · The Narrows |
| Manzanita coast | 22 / 21 | 26 Clear | Good | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 23 / 20 | 26 Clear | Good | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 23 / 20 | 26 Clear | Good | – steady | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Astoria coast | 26 / 23 | 12 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 27 / 24 | 12 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 37 / 28 | 57 Hazy | Moderate | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Silver Falls valley | 45 / 33 | 55 Hazy | Moderate | – steady | 33 mi · The Narrows |
| Portland valley | 48 / 38 | 36 Clear | Good | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 53 / 37 | 40 Clear | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 119 / 70 | 126 Smoky | Moderate | ▲ worsening | 22 mi · Akawa Butte |
| Hood River east of crest | n/a | 53 Hazy | Sensitive groups | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 08/19/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 08/19/26 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 2026-08-23 | 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, 2026-07-31 to 2026-08-13 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.375 on the coast to 1.056 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Aug 19 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 36, 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 20 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 highest 24-hour-average US AQI for PM2.5 that touches any of Aug 28, 29, or 30, 2026, at the house in Welches, on the local ground-monitor scale — the number a phone app would show — with the model-to-monitor correction already applied in the evidence and none added by me. The 'worst day of trip' figures are the maximum across those three days, not their average.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.