First, a data problem you should know about: the evidence pack is dated October 12 but the trip dates are August 28-30, so this is a reconstruction of a weekend that has already happened, not a forecast — if you meant a future weekend, re-run it with the right dates. For the weekend as given, the house sits on the wet west side of the Cascades where the usual late-summer sea breeze pushes clean ocean air up the Sandy River valley, and the big fire nearby (Grasshopper, ~94,000 acres) was on the far side of Mt Hood, so it only reaches you when the wind flips and blows from the east.
Most likely you got a faintly hazy sky with air in the 20s to 40s, a meaningful chance of one genuinely smoky day near 100, and roughly a one-in-ten chance of a real smoke episode above 150 that would have sent people indoors.
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 1038% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp-edged all three days, blue sky, maybe a thin brown smudge on the eastern horizon at sunset; nobody mentions the air. | nothing |
| 3 in 1033% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the ridge across the valley softened, a faint campfire smell in the morning that burns off by noon; sensitive people notice, the hike still happens. | Move the long hike to the morning, run the purifier at night, keep the windows shut after dark when cold air drains down the valley and pools smoke. |
| 2 in 1018% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 One day you can look straight at an orange sun, visibility a mile or two, throats scratchy, the kids coughing after an hour outside; the other two days are much better. | That day becomes an indoor day — board games, drive west to the valley floor or the coast for the afternoon, N95s for anyone going outside. |
| 1 in 1012% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Ash flecks on the car, the far side of the river gone, headaches by mid-afternoon, indoor air visibly hazy even with the house closed up. | Cut the trip short or relocate west; anyone with asthma, a heart condition, or a small child should not stay. |
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: 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, 27 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 (+26 on the likely worst day) across 63 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 11 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 controlling mechanism at this address is flow direction, not fire proximity: Welches sits in the Sandy River valley on the wet west slope, and in late August the default is onshore westerly flow through the Columbia Gorge that keeps the corridor in the Good band even in severe statewide fire years — 2024 set the prior acreage record and this location still averaged a daily max of 12 in this window. The two fires that matter are Grasshopper, 94,000 acres at 17 miles due east, and Austin, 12,900 acres at 18 miles south; the pack's own terrain note that Mt Hood 'sits between' the house and the eastern fires overstates the protection, because easterly gradient events move smoke through the Gorge and down the east-southeast-draining Sandy valley regardless of the peak, and the Austin fire to the south needs no crest crossing at all. Against that, climatological offshore frequency in this window is 31% with no ensemble available to say whether the actual weekend beat or missed it, and the local measured season anomaly is 1.05 — essentially normal air at this location despite a record statewide season, which is the single strongest piece of evidence that the transport pathway stayed closed.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 15 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 19 · 2024: 12 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 13.
We are forecasting a worst day of 68, 53 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 |
| 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 · 95% contained |
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 |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 20 / 15 | 8 Clear | Good | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Newport coast | 20 / 17 | 13 Clear | Good | – steady | 101 mi · Austin |
| Astoria coast | 25 / 22 | 19 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 25 / 22 | 19 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Manzanita coast | 26 / 24 | 33 Clear | — | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 28 / 24 | 33 Clear | — | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 29 / 26 | 33 Clear | — | – steady | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 40 / 26 | 18 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| McMinnville valley | 45 / 32 | 44 Clear | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Portland valley | 46 / 37 | 59 Hazy | Good | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 49 / 36 | 25 Clear | — | – steady | 31 mi · Austin |
| Bend east of crest | 56 / 33 | 33 Clear | — | ▼ clearing | 35 mi · Crosswhite |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/12/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/12/26 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 2026-10-16 | 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, 2026-09-24 to 2026-10-07 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.37 on the coast to 0.694 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Oct 12 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 27, 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 290 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, taking for each calendar day the highest 24-hour AQI value that touches that day, at the house at 45.3201 N, -121.9561 W in Mt Hood Village/Welches, Oregon — and then reporting the single worst such day across the three trip days, not the three-day average. All numbers are on the local monitor scale that a phone app displays, already calibrated from the raw model scale by the factor of 0.244 given in the pack; I applied no additional bias correction of my own.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.