The air at the house is clean right now, and every ensemble we have says the east wind that would drag the big fire's smoke over the mountain is unusually unlikely this weekend. Most likely you get clear to slightly hazy skies, with the worst single day landing in the 20s to 40s — that's good air by any phone app's standard.
The real risk isn't the big fire, it's the smaller uncontained ones 12 to 19 miles south and west that are on your side of the mountain: if one of them makes a run, a calm night can settle its smoke into the valley and hand you one genuinely unhealthy day, which we'd put at about one chance in five.
If we ran this weekend 100 times, here is how they would split. Hover a row to pick it out of the dots.
| 6 in 1058% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp against blue sky, maybe milky haze on the southern horizon at sunset; nobody comments on the air. | nothing |
| 3 in 1028% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Whitish sky, ridgelines soften, a faint campfire smell in the morning that burns off by noon. Sunsets go orange. Fine for hiking; a couple of people with asthma notice. | Nothing cancels. Do the long hike in the morning before the afternoon haze thickens, and close the windows overnight. |
| 1 in 109% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 You wake up to a valley full of gray, the far side of the river is indistinct, smoke smell indoors. Sun is a dim orange disc until midday. Everyone feels it in their throat after an hour outside. | That day moves indoors — no hiking, no long outdoor meals. Run a HEPA purifier, keep windows shut, N95s for anyone who goes out. The trip still happens. |
| 0 in 105% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Visibility down to a few hundred yards, headlights on at noon, indoor air noticeably smoky even with windows closed. Possible Level 1 evacuation notice or an air quality advisory on your phone. | Kids, older folks and anyone with asthma should not be there. Cut the trip short or relocate west toward the valley; check ODOT TripCheck before driving US-26. |
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 (1,915 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 Aug 23 · Austin Aug 23 · The Narrows Aug 23 · Mitchell Aug 16. The oldest is Mitchell, 7 days behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Aug 23, 10:07 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 better (-7 on the likely worst day) across 15 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 big fire, Grasshopper at 93,744 acres, is 17 miles east with Mt Hood between it and the house, and getting its smoke to Welches requires easterly flow that the ensembles put at 3% of member-days against a 31% climatological rate for this window — a 28-point negative departure across two model families is real evidence against the scenario the bad case depends on, not just an absence of evidence. What the terrain note gets wrong is that not all the fires are east: Mitchell (12.5 mi S), The Narrows (13.9 mi SSW, 0% contained), Austin (18.6 mi S, 5,620 acres, 0% contained) and Sweetwater (19.3 mi W, size unreported) are all on the west slope with no ridge between them and the house, so they need no wind reversal at all — just the light southerly drainage flow the NWS is already forecasting. Against that, the house is reading 13 right now with the wind blowing from the fires toward it, which tells you the current emissions are small and the mixing is efficient; the smoke in the forecast is diffuse and largely aloft. These fires will still be burning on the 28th — Oregon fires this size in a record-drought year with fuels fully cured do not go out in four days, and the first season-ending rain almost never arrives before mid-September — so the question is transport, not persistence, and transport is the part that looks favorable.
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 35, 23 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 12.5 mi | Mitchell S | 16 acres |
| 13.9 mi | The Narrows SSW | 232 acres · 0% contained |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,744 acres · 76% contained |
| 18.6 mi | Austin S | 5,620 acres · 0% contained |
| 19.3 mi | Sweetwater W | size not yet reported |
| 37.0 mi | High Lava N | 1,915 acres · 25% contained |
| 41.7 mi | West 8 ENE | size not yet reported |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 2 of the nearby fires (Sweetwater, 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 | 5.7 mi |
| Brightwood | 10.9 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 | 18 / 15 | 9 Clear | Good | – steady | 102 mi · The Narrows |
| Cannon Beach coast | 22 / 19 | 13 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Hood River east of crest | 22 / 15 | 28 Clear | Moderate | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Manzanita coast | 24 / 22 | 13 Clear | — | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 24 / 21 | 13 Clear | — | – steady | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Astoria coast | 24 / 21 | 16 Clear | Moderate | ▲ worsening | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 27 / 24 | 16 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 29 / 21 | 53 Hazy | Good | ▲ worsening | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Silver Falls valley | 50 / 37 | 16 Clear | — | – steady | 33 mi · The Narrows |
| Portland valley | 54 / 44 | 34 Clear | Good | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 56 / 40 | 21 Clear | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 123 / 72 | 93 Hazy | — | ▲ worsening | 22 mi · Akawa Butte |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 08/24/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 08/24/26 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 2026-08-28 | 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 24 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 22, 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 45 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'm forecasting the US EPA AQI for PM2.5 — the version built on a 24-hour average concentration, which is what a phone weather or air quality app shows you — at the house in Welches, on the local monitor scale already calibrated from the model (I did not re-apply the 0.2 factor). For each calendar day I give the highest such 24-hour AQI value touching that day, and the headline number is the single worst of the three trip 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.