Several very large fires are burning within 20 to 45 miles of the house, and two of them are on the same side of the mountains as Welches, so the ridge does not protect you from everything. Most likely the weekend is merely hazy — a worst day somewhere in the 60s to 80s, annoying for a run but fine for sitting on the deck — because the usual late-August pattern pushes cool ocean air inland and blows smoke away from the house.
The real risk, roughly one chance in five, is that high pressure rebuilds, the wind turns around to come downslope off the east side of Mt Hood, and one of the three days lands above 150, which is the day asthmatics and kids should stay indoors.
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 1021% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp against blue sky all three days, no smell of smoke, cool damp mornings. | nothing |
| 4 in 1039% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the mountain soft-edged, a faint campfire smell in the morning that burns off by noon. Everything outdoors still works. | Anyone with asthma carries an inhaler; skip the hard midday hike and do it early. |
| 2 in 1024% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Orange-tinted sun, ridgelines a mile away going flat and grey, eyes and throat scratchy after an hour outside. | That day becomes an indoor day — windows shut, box fan and filter running, drive to Portland for lunch if anyone is struggling. |
| 2 in 1017% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ You can taste it. Visibility under a mile or two, the sun a dull disc, ash flecks on car hoods, headache by evening. | Kids, older guests and anyone with lung or heart trouble should leave; the rest either stay inside with filtration or cut the trip a day short. |
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, 33 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 (+43 on the likely worst day) across 69 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 containment numbers in this pack (98% on Grasshopper, 98% on Austin, 90% on Bench) are a mid-September snapshot; a 94,000-acre and a 67,000-acre fire that reached those figures by 17 September were almost certainly still growing or only partly lined over 28-30 August, so the trip weekend sits near the active phase of both, not the mop-up phase. Bearings matter more than the mountain here: Austin at 18 miles S and Bench at 46 miles SSE are in the Clackamas and Breitenbush drainages, on the same side of the crest as the house, so ordinary southerly or up-valley flow delivers their smoke with no terrain barrier at all — only Grasshopper, 17 miles due E, needs the offshore reversal the bad case depends on. Against that, everything measured at this address is quiet: Estacada reads 38, the 30-day local anomaly ratio is 1.05, and 28 sampled climatological days in this window never exceeded 100, with a worst observed value of 98. The honest resolution is that the base rate is right about the typical day and wrong about the tail, because 2022-2025 contained no analogue to 175,000 acres of nearby fire in a 2.34-million-acre, PL5, lowest-snowpack-on-record year — and the archive explicitly omits 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021. Late August is also the window where the first marine push usually arrives but the first season-ending rain usually does not, which is why the central estimate lands in Moderate rather than Good: hazy, with the mountain soft-edged, more often than clear.
A normal late August here is Hazy - median AQI 53 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 69 · 2024: 44 · 2023: 47 · 2022: 48.
We are forecasting a worst day of 85, 32 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 |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,971 acres · 98% contained |
| 18.3 mi | Austin S | 12,888 acres · 98% contained |
| 37.0 mi | High Lava N | 2,899 acres · 100% contained |
| 44.1 mi | Muddy Run RX SSE | size not yet reported |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 90% contained |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 2 of the nearby fires (Latigo Lane, Muddy Run RX) 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 | 14 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 101 mi · Austin |
| Astoria coast | 21 / 18 | 13 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 22 / 19 | 13 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 23 / 17 | 37 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Manzanita coast | 29 / 27 | 14 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 31 / 27 | 14 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 31 / 28 | 14 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 42 / 28 | 22 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Portland valley | 47 / 38 | 53 Hazy | Good | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 53 / 39 | 44 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 31 mi · Austin |
| McMinnville valley | 55 / 38 | 39 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 58 / 34 | 53 Hazy | — | – steady | 36 mi · Bench |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/18/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/18/26 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 2026-10-22 | 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 18 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 98, 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 320 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 US EPA AQI for PM2.5 computed as a 24-hour average concentration — the highest such 24-hour AQI value that touches each calendar day at the Welches house (45.320, -121.956) — reported on the local monitor scale that a phone app like AirNow would display, already bias-calibrated in the evidence pack, with no further correction applied by me. The headline number is the worst single one of the three trip days (28, 29, 30 August 2026), not the three-day average. Note that these dates are 51 days in the past relative to the 18 October 2026 pack date, so this is a hindcast written as a forecast from the information given.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.