You are already two days into this trip and the air is clean: the monitor about nine miles away is reading in the Good range, and the weather through Sunday is fog, marine air off the ocean, and a chance of light rain — all of which hold smoke down. The one big fire, Grasshopper, sits east of Mt Hood and is 81% contained, and every one of 104 ensemble forecast-days says the east wind that would be needed to push its smoke over the mountain is simply not showing up; our worst-day estimate for the trip is about 24 AQI, with a realistic bad case near 55.
The small remaining risk is local rather than over-the-mountain — The Narrows and Austin fires are uncontained and on your side of the crest to the south — so if Sunday burns off hot and the light southwest flow lines up, you could get haze, but nothing here justifies changing the plan.
If we ran this weekend 100 times, here is how they would split. Hover a row to pick it out of the dots.
| 8 in 1083% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Morning fog in the river valley burning off to blue sky; Mt Hood sharp-edged from the highway; no smell of smoke. | nothing |
| 1 in 1013% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, ridgelines to the south softened, a faint campfire smell in the cool morning air that clears by midday. | Sunday's marine layer burns off early and afternoon heating lets The Narrows or Austin put up a visible column that drifts north on light southwest flow. |
| 0 in 103% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Orange-tinted sun, visibility a couple of miles, obvious smoke smell indoors, the group moves the evening onto the porch and then inside. | Austin (10,261 acres, 0% contained, 18.6 miles due south) makes a wind-driven run Sunday afternoon and calm, foggy overnight conditions trap the plume in the Sandy/Salmon valley. |
| 0 in 101% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Ash flecks on car hoods, sun a dull red disc, sub-mile visibility, air quality alerts and possible evacuation notices to the south. | A new ignition within a few miles of Welches on the west slope, or an unforecast dry offshore surge — neither of which any of 104 ensemble member-days supports. |
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), Ten Mile (4,834 acres, 56.7 mi SE), High Lava (2,871 acres, 37.0 mi N), Beachcomb (2,346 acres, 49.5 mi SSE).
An outline is only as current as the last mapping flight, which is not the same as when this page refreshed. Outlines flown — Grasshopper Aug 28 · Austin Aug 28 · The Narrows Aug 28. The oldest is Grasshopper, 0 days behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Aug 29, 4:31 AM, 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.
The long-range ensembles show less east-wind risk than a normal year — weak evidence, but pointing the right way.
Caveat: this counts days whose dominant wind is easterly, which at a valley site also picks up ordinary overnight down-valley drainage, not only the Gorge-outflow events that actually carry smoke. Forecast and base rate are measured the same way, so the gap is the meaningful part; the absolute percentages are not a chance-of-smoke.
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 better (-18 on the likely worst day) across 20 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 produces dangerous smoke at Welches is offshore east flow carrying the big east-side fires — chiefly Grasshopper at 93,924 acres — over the Cascade crest and down the west slope; that mechanism is measurably switched off, with 0 of 104 ensemble member-days offshore on the trip dates against a 31% climatological rate for this calendar window, a 31-point negative departure that is real evidence, not just a restated prior. In its place the pattern is textbook marine: patchy fog, west-southwest to west flow at 1-5 mph, and a chance of light rain Saturday, which simultaneously raises humidity at the fires, damps fire behavior on cured fuels, and scavenges particulate out of the column. Terrain is not doing the work here and I am not relying on it — The Narrows (13.9 mi, bearing 208), Austin (18.6 mi, due south), Highland (24.3 mi WSW) and Edison are all on the house's own side of the crest, and The Narrows and Austin are 0% contained, so the honest residual risk is a local west-slope plume advected north on the very flow that is otherwise protective. That risk is bounded by size and moisture: 292 acres and 10,261 acres in fog and light rain, with the nearest monitor sitting at 13, cannot realistically build a 24-hour average above 100 at this address in the day and a half of trip that remains.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 12 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 16 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 11.
We are forecasting a worst day of 24, 12 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 13.9 mi | The Narrows SSW | 292 acres · 0% contained |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,924 acres · 81% contained |
| 18.6 mi | Austin S | 10,261 acres · 0% contained |
| 24.3 mi | Highland WSW | size not yet reported |
| 36.4 mi | Warehouse NW | 2 acres |
| 37.0 mi | High Lava N | 2,871 acres · 23% contained |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 90% contained |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 1 of the nearby fires (Highland) 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 | 14.6 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 |
| Newport coast | 18 / 15 | 16 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 102 mi · Austin |
| Cannon Beach coast | 22 / 19 | 23 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Hood River east of crest | 22 / 15 | 21 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Manzanita coast | 24 / 22 | 23 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 24 / 21 | 23 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Astoria coast | 24 / 21 | 20 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 27 / 24 | 20 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 29 / 21 | 12 Clear | Moderate | ▼ clearing | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Silver Falls valley | 50 / 37 | 21 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 31 mi · Austin |
| Portland valley | 54 / 44 | 26 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 56 / 40 | 21 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 123 / 72 | 14 Clear | Moderate | ▲ worsening | 22 mi · Akawa Butte |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 08/29/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 08/29/26 by Oregon Dept. of Environmental Quality | Next published outlook for that reporting area — a human forecaster's call Oregon DEQ via AirNow |
| Next 5 days | today's model run, covering 2026-09-02 | 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, 2026-08-08 to 2026-08-21 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.342 on the coast to 1.091 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Aug 29 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 22, 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 70 scored forecast-days, the air-quality model beat both simple baselines at 2 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 — specifically the highest 24-hour-average AQI value touching each calendar day at the house in Mt Hood Village/Welches — reported on the local ground-monitor scale that a phone app such as AirNow would display, not the raw CAMS model scale, and with no further bias correction applied by me on top of the pack's 0.2 calibration factor. The headline number is the worst single day of August 28-30, not the three-day average.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.