The large fire near the house is on the far side of Mt Hood, and the winds expected during your trip run the wrong direction to carry its smoke across the mountain to you. Expect a hazy weekend that smells faintly of campfire rather than a dangerous one — most likely somewhere in the upper 50s on your phone's air app on the worst day, which is about what it reads there right now.
The real risk isn't the fires already on the map; it's a new one starting closer to the house in the next week, which is why the group should take one more look on Tuesday the 25th before anyone drives out.
If we ran this weekend 100 times, here is how they would split. Hover a row to pick it out of the dots.
| 3 in 1033% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp against the sky from the deck, no smell, kids outside all day, phone app says Good or low Moderate every morning. | nothing |
| 4 in 1043% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the mountain a soft grey outline, an orange sunset, a faint campfire smell in the morning that burns off by early afternoon. Nobody healthy notices anything but the view; one or two people with asthma feel a scratchy throat. | Run a purifier in the main room, close windows overnight, move the long hike to the morning and keep the afternoon low-key. |
| 2 in 1016% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 You can't see the mountain at all and can barely see the ridge across the valley. Smell is obvious indoors. Eyes sting after an hour outside. Anyone with asthma or a heart condition is uncomfortable. | Everyone with a lung or heart condition stays inside with purifiers running; N95s for anyone who must be outdoors; cancel the hike, keep the trip. |
| 1 in 108% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Brown-orange daylight, visibility under a mile, headlights on at noon, the house smells smoky even shut up. Healthy adults get headaches and sore throats. Possible evacuation-readiness notices in the Hoodland corridor. | Sensitive people go home early; everyone else stays indoors with purifiers or the whole group relocates west toward Portland or the coast. |
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), Beachcomb (2,346 acres, 49.5 mi SSE), High Lava (1,562 acres, 37.2 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 Aug 18 · Austin Aug 18 · The Narrows Aug 18 · Mitchell Aug 16. The oldest is Mitchell, 3 days behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Aug 20, 4:01 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 worse (+16 on the likely worst day) across 11 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 |
| Aug 22 | Air-quality / smoke model (CAMS) actual AQI at the house · reaches 6 days out |
The dominant smoke source, Grasshopper at 92,456 acres, is 17 miles due east with Mt Hood between it and the house, so it only reaches Welches under easterly downslope flow — and the ensembles put that at 5% of 156 member-days against a 31% climatological rate for the same calendar window, a 26-point deficit that both GFS and GEM agree on, which is the strongest single piece of evidence in the pack and it argues against the bad case. It is also 66% contained and will likely be 80%+ by the 28th. I did check the bearings rather than assuming the crest protects the house: Mitchell (12.5 mi S), The Narrows (14 mi SSW) and Austin (19 mi S) are all on the west side, the same side as the house, and Austin and The Narrows are 0% contained — that is why my number sits well above climatology despite the favorable wind signal. The realistic worst case here is not a dramatic east-wind event but the boring one: a near-calm, stagnant pattern (winds are already 0-2 mph) in which a local west-slope fire's plume pools in the Sandy River valley overnight and doesn't flush, which is almost certainly what is producing the 54 reading at Multorpor right now under otherwise clean flow. Against that, the season anomaly of 1.88x is measured at this exact location and already prices in this year's severity as it has actually manifested here, and 0 of 28 sampled days in this window ever exceeded 100 — though with the archive starting in 2022 I treat that zero as under-sampled, not as proof, which is where the 7% tail comes from.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 17 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 23 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 16.
We are forecasting a worst day of 58, 41 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 12.5 mi | Mitchell S | 16 acres |
| 14.0 mi | The Narrows SSW | 174 acres · 0% contained |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 92,456 acres · 66% contained |
| 19.0 mi | Austin S | 3,760 acres · 0% contained |
| 37.2 mi | High Lava N | 1,562 acres · 8% contained |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 90% contained |
| 49.5 mi | Beachcomb SSE | 2,346 acres · 100% 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 | 15.6 mi |
| Welches | 14.3 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 | 19 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 102 mi · The Narrows |
| Manzanita coast | 22 / 21 | 31 Clear | Good | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 23 / 20 | 31 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 23 / 20 | 31 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Astoria coast | 26 / 23 | 21 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 27 / 24 | 21 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 37 / 28 | 9 Clear | Moderate | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Silver Falls valley | 45 / 33 | 52 Hazy | Good | – steady | 33 mi · The Narrows |
| Portland valley | 48 / 38 | 55 Hazy | Good | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 53 / 37 | 46 Clear | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 119 / 70 | 110 Smoky | Moderate | ▼ clearing | 22 mi · Akawa Butte |
| Hood River east of crest | n/a | 91 Hazy | Moderate | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 08/20/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 08/20/26 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 2026-08-24 | 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, 2026-07-31 to 2026-08-13 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.375 on the coast to 1.056 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Aug 20 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 32, 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 25 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 — the highest such 24-hour AQI value touching each calendar day at the Welches house — on the local monitor scale that a phone app like AirNow shows, matching the nearby Multorpor station reading 54 today, with no further bias correction applied on my part since the pack's numbers are already calibrated off the model scale. 'Worst day of trip' is the single highest of those three daily values across Aug 28, 29 and 30, not their average.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.