These dates are already behind us — the trip was seven weeks ago — so this is a reconstruction, not a live forecast. On that last weekend of August there were two substantial fires inside twenty miles of the house: a very large one on the east flank of Mt Hood and a mid-sized one to the south, both still actively burning then and only reported as nearly contained in mid-September.
Most of the time the summer wind blows west-to-east and pushes that smoke away from Welches, so the likeliest weekend was hazy but breathable, with roughly a two-in-five chance that at least one of the three days averaged into the unhealthy-for-sensitive-groups range or worse.
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 1037% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp all three days, blue sky, maybe a thin brown line on the eastern horizon at sunset; no smell of smoke in the morning. | nothing |
| 4 in 1036% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the mountain soft-edged, a campfire smell on the deck at 7am that burns off by mid-morning; orange sun. Everyone fine, a couple of people mention a scratchy throat. | Shift the hike to late morning after the valley drainage clears; keep windows shut overnight. |
| 2 in 1016% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 One day you can't see Hood at all and the ridgeline across the Zigzag valley is a grey silhouette; visible haze indoors against a lamp; anyone with asthma reaching for an inhaler. | That day becomes an indoor day — board games, drive west to Sandy or Portland for the afternoon where it's usually cleaner. |
| 1 in 1011% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Brown-grey air with visibility under a mile, headlights on at noon, eyes stinging outdoors, ash flecks on car hoods, and smoke still thick at 2pm instead of lifting. | Cut the trip short or relocate to the coast; sensitive members shouldn't be there at all. |
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, 30 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 66 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 8 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 fact in this pack is proximity, not statewide acreage: Grasshopper at 93,971 acres sits 17.4 miles due east and Austin at 12,888 acres sits 18.3 miles south, and both are reported at 98% containment only as of a mid-September figures timestamp — meaning on August 28-30 they were still in their active phase, with fully cured fuels and PL-5 resource constraints slowing initial attack. Terrain does not settle this: Austin is on the same west-slope side of the crest as the house, and east-side smoke from Grasshopper reaches Welches whenever flow goes offshore over the Hood saddle and sinks down the Zigzag drainage, which the local record puts at about 31% of days in this calendar window. Working the other direction, late August in the Oregon Cascades is dominated by onshore west-northwest flow that carries east-side smoke away from this address, which is exactly why 2024 — also a 2-million-acre record year — produced a mean daily max of just 11 here; statewide totals are east-side totals and do not transport to this house. Because US AQI for PM2.5 is a 24-hour average, the realistic bad outcome is not a dramatic plume but a nightly inversion that traps drainage smoke and keeps the daily average elevated into the morning, which is how a mountain-corridor community gets to 100-150 without ever being threatened by flame.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 13 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 17 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 12.
We are forecasting a worst day of 56, 43 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 |
| 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 |
| 18.4 mi | Stone Ck/Clackamas Guard Station Rx - West SSE | size not yet reported |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 4 of the nearby fires (Timber Lake/Ripplebrook Admin Rx - West, Fawn Stew Piles Rx - West, Podunk Admin 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 | 16.9 mi |
| Brightwood | 15.3 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 |
| Newport coast | 20 / 17 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 101 mi · Austin |
| Astoria coast | 21 / 18 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 22 / 19 | 11 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 23 / 17 | 9 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Manzanita coast | 29 / 27 | 18 Clear | — | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 31 / 27 | 18 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 31 / 28 | 18 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 42 / 28 | 19 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Portland valley | 47 / 38 | 57 Hazy | Good | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 53 / 39 | 27 Clear | — | – steady | 31 mi · Austin |
| McMinnville valley | 55 / 38 | 28 Clear | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 58 / 34 | 38 Clear | — | – steady | 35 mi · Crosswhite |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/15/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/15/26 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 2026-10-19 | 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 15 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 (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 25, 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 305 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 — the single highest 24-hour AQI value touching each calendar day at the house in Welches, Oregon — expressed on the local monitor scale that a phone app would display (already bias-calibrated from the raw model scale, with no further correction applied by me), and I am reporting the worst single day of the three-day trip, not the three-day mean.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.