First, a correction to the premise: today is October 23, 2026, and August 28-30 already happened, so nothing here is a forecast you can act on and this evidence pack contains no actual measurement from the trip window itself. Judged on what the pack does show about that window, the likely worst day was in the yellow 'moderate' range - visible haze, smells faintly of campfire, fine for most people but noticeable if you have asthma.
The real risk was not the weekend average but a single east-wind day pulling smoke off the 94,000-acre Grasshopper fire 17 miles east, which would have pushed one of the three days into the orange 'unhealthy for sensitive groups' zone; that was about a one-in-five chance.
If we ran this weekend 100 times, here is how they would split. Hover a row to pick it out of the dots.
| 5 in 1049% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp against blue sky from the Welches golf course, cool damp mornings, no campfire smell. Marine air holding onshore the whole weekend. | nothing |
| 3 in 1029% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, Hood's outline soft, a faint smoke smell on the deck in the morning. Phone app says yellow. Nobody feels it except maybe one asthmatic. | Keep the hike short and in the morning, close windows overnight, run the AC on recirculate instead of opening up. |
| 1 in 1013% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 One day of orange sun, visibility down the Salmon River valley under a few miles, eyes scratchy, Hood invisible. The other two days clear or just hazy. | Cancel outdoor plans for that one day - board games and a box-fan filter indoors. Anyone with asthma or a young kid stays inside. |
| 1 in 109% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Brown-grey air at ground level, streetlights on at noon, ash flecks on car hoods, smoke indoors even with windows shut. Headaches by evening. | Leave - drive west to Portland or the coast. US-26 toward Sandy stays open; the smoke is the problem, not the road. |
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, 38 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 (+14 on the likely worst day) across 74 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 mechanism that governs this address is flow direction, not fire proximity: Welches sits on the west slope in air that is onshore roughly two days in three, which ventilates the Zigzag and Sandy valleys and carries smoke away eastward. The threat is a reversal - a thermal trough east of the Cascades flipping the gradient to easterly, which would have drawn the column off Grasshopper, 93,971 acres at bearing 090 and just 17.4 miles away, down the west slope through the passes; Mt Hood's 11,250 feet does not shield the house, because the smoke layer is deeper than the crest and funnels around it, and in any case Austin (12,888 acres, due south) and The Narrows sit on the same west side of the divide with nothing between them and the house. Both Grasshopper and Austin read 98% contained as of mid-September figures, which means that on August 28-30 they were materially less contained and still producing - Oregon fires of that size in a record 2.34-million-acre, 96%-drought, PL-5 season do not stop smoking in late August; they stop when the first frontal rain arrives, typically mid-to-late September here. Against that, the offshore rate for this calendar window is only 31% climatologically and no ensemble was supplied to raise or lower it, the measured season anomaly ratio is 1.02 - essentially normal air at this location, though that ratio was computed over the last 30 days and so describes October, not August - and in 28 sampled days across 2022-2025 this location never once exceeded AQI 100, with a worst observed day of 60.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 32 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 42 · 2024: 27 · 2023: 28 · 2022: 29.
We are forecasting a worst day of 56, 24 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 |
| 16.5 mi | Timber Lake/Ripplebrook Admin Rx - West SSW | size not yet reported |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,971 acres · 98% contained |
| 18.3 mi | Austin S | 12,888 acres · 98% contained |
| 20.3 mi | Austin Repair Pile Rx - West S | size not yet reported |
| 23.0 mi | Goat Stew Rx - West S | size not yet reported |
| 29.5 mi | Slow DXP/Lemiti Rx - West SSE | size not yet reported |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 4 of the nearby fires (Timber Lake/Ripplebrook Admin Rx - West, Austin Repair Pile Rx - West, Goat Stew Rx - West and 1 more) 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 |
| Astoria coast | 19 / 16 | 11 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 19 / 17 | 11 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Newport coast | 25 / 21 | 15 Clear | Good | – steady | 101 mi · Austin |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 30 / 22 | 11 Clear | Good | ▼ clearing | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Manzanita coast | 30 / 28 | 14 Clear | — | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 31 / 27 | 14 Clear | — | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 32 / 29 | 14 Clear | — | – steady | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 46 / 30 | 18 Clear | Good | ▼ clearing | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Silver Falls valley | 50 / 37 | 29 Clear | — | – steady | 31 mi · Austin |
| Portland valley | 67 / 54 | 52 Hazy | Good | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 76 / 53 | 26 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 78 / 45 | 35 Clear | — | ▼ clearing | 36 mi · Bench |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/23/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/23/26 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 2026-10-27 | 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, 2026-10-09 to 2026-10-22 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.351 on the coast to 1.066 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Oct 23 5:01 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 60, 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 345 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 estimating the US EPA AQI for PM2.5 as a 24-hour average - the highest such 24-hour AQI value touching any of the three calendar days August 28, 29 and 30, 2026, at the house in Welches, Oregon - reported on the local monitor scale that a phone app would display, with the evidence pack's 0.537 calibration already baked in and no further bias correction applied by me. I report the worst single day of the three, not the three-day mean. I also note the quantity is unforecastable in the ordinary sense: those dates are 56 days in the past as of today, October 23, 2026.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.