First, a flag on the evidence: today is October 16, 2026, so August 28-30 has already happened and this is a reconstruction of what that weekend most likely looked like, not a live forecast. For that window, the most likely outcome at the house was a somewhat hazy valley with air in the Moderate range — noticeable smell and flat light in the mornings, fine for most people outdoors, and the single worst 24-hour average probably in the 40s or 50s.
The real risk was not the big fire east of Mt Hood blowing straight over the mountain, but cool night air sliding down the Zigzag/Sandy valley off the east slope and pooling until mid-morning, which is what would have pushed one day past 100 roughly one time 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.
| 4 in 1039% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp from the deck all three days, maybe a faint smell at dawn that is gone by nine; nobody mentions the air after the first morning. | nothing |
| 3 in 1034% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the summit soft or hidden, campfire smell on the morning air and an orange-tinted sunset; kids and runners feel it a little, everyone else just notices it looks odd. | Night drainage off the east slope pools smoke in the valley and the morning inversion holds it until 10-11 am; afternoons mix out clean. |
| 2 in 1016% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 One day where the ridge across the highway is a grey outline, eyes and throat scratchy, and the group moves the hike to a drive and a board game; the other two days are merely hazy. | A 24-48 hour offshore/east-wind push over the crest, or a stagnant high with no afternoon mixing, stacks smoke for a full diurnal cycle instead of just overnight. |
| 1 in 1011% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Daytime sun as a dull disc, smoke indoors even with windows shut, headaches, everyone checking phones; realistically the weekend becomes an indoor weekend or you leave early. | Either a multi-day east-wind event while Grasshopper's east-slope edge is still open, or a new ignition inside ~15 miles on the WEST side of the crest — Sandy/Zigzag/Clackamas corridor — with initial attack thin at national Preparedness Level 5. |
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, 31 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 (+12 on the likely worst day) across 67 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 decisive physical fact is bearing, not size: Grasshopper's 94,000 acres sit 17 miles due EAST, behind the 11,250-foot crest, and need a synoptic reversal to reach the house — but Austin's 12,888 acres sit 18 miles due SOUTH and The Narrows 14 miles SSW, both on the west slope, where the mountain provides no shielding whatsoever and ordinary valley flow suffices. Against that, the cheapest transport path for the big east-side fire is not a dramatic east-wind event but routine nocturnal drainage: the Zigzag/Sandy valley drains westward off Mt Hood, so night and early-morning flow at this house comes from the ESE — exactly the bearing of the fire, and exactly what the current obs show (overnight SE 8 mph, ESE Friday). Because the AQI is a 24-hour mean, that mechanism typically buys 50-100, not 150+, since clean well-mixed afternoons dilute the smoky pre-dawn hours; getting past 150 requires a multi-day stagnant or offshore regime that holds through the afternoon. I am applying a 3x multiplier to the climatological median of 18 rather than a larger one because the 28-day historical sample has never exceeded 34 here in this window even in 2024, a prior record acreage year — the statewide total genuinely is dominated by east-side fires that do not transport to this address — and because all three nearby fires did in fact reach 98% containment, which means their late-August trajectory was toward decay rather than growth.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 18 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 24 · 2024: 15 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 17.
We are forecasting a worst day of 54, 36 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 |
| 15.9 mi | Latigo Lane WNW | size not yet reported |
| 16.5 mi | Timber Lake/Ripplebrook Admin Rx - West SSW | size not yet reported |
| 16.5 mi | Fawn Stew Piles Rx - West SSW | size not yet reported |
| 17.2 mi | Podunk Admin Rx - West SW | size not yet reported |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,971 acres · 98% contained |
| 18.3 mi | Austin S | 12,888 acres · 98% contained |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 4 of the nearby fires (Latigo Lane, Timber Lake/Ripplebrook Admin Rx - West, Fawn Stew Piles 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 | 2.7 mi |
| Brightwood | 7.1 mi |
| Welches | 13.6 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 | 18 Clear | Good | – steady | 101 mi · Austin |
| Astoria coast | 21 / 18 | 23 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 22 / 19 | 23 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 23 / 17 | 14 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Manzanita coast | 29 / 27 | 23 Clear | — | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 31 / 27 | 23 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 31 / 28 | 23 Clear | — | – steady | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 42 / 28 | 34 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Portland valley | 47 / 38 | 58 Hazy | Good | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 53 / 39 | 27 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 31 mi · Austin |
| McMinnville valley | 55 / 38 | 47 Clear | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 58 / 34 | 53 Hazy | — | – steady | 35 mi · Crosswhite |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/16/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/16/26 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 2026-10-20 | 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, 2026-10-01 to 2026-10-14 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.37 on the coast to 0.768 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Oct 16 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 34, 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 310 scored forecast-days, the air-quality model beat both simple baselines at 0 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 US EPA AQI for PM2.5 as a 24-hour average concentration — specifically the highest 24-hour AQI value touching each calendar day — at the house in Mt Hood Village / Welches, Oregon (45.3201, -121.9561), on the local monitor scale that a phone app such as AirNow would display, already calibrated from the raw CAMS model scale by the 0.306 factor given in the pack, to which I have applied no further bias correction of my own. The headline quantity is the single WORST of the three trip days (Aug 28, 29, 30), not their average. One caveat I will not paper over: today is 2026-10-16, so those dates are 49 days in the past and this is a reconstruction of that window rather than a forward forecast.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.