The air at the house is already lightly smoky and will most likely stay that way through the weekend — hazy views, a faint campfire smell, breathable for most people but not crisp. The likeliest worst day lands in the yellow 'Moderate' range near 70, which is fine for healthy adults and worth pacing for anyone with asthma or young kids.
The real risk isn't the big fire east of Mt Hood, which the wind pattern is steering away from you; it's one of the small uncontained fires 13–19 miles to the south or west making a run and its smoke settling into the Zigzag valley overnight — roughly a one-in-four chance that tips a day into orange.
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 1016% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp against blue sky from the Welches meadow, no smell, kids outside all day. | nothing |
| 6 in 1061% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, ridgelines soft, faint campfire smell strongest at 7am and after dinner, sun a little orange at sunset. Everyone still hikes; it just doesn't look like a postcard. | Nothing structural — do hikes in the early afternoon when the valley has mixed out, close windows overnight. |
| 1 in 1015% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 You wake up and can't see the far side of the Salmon River valley; the smell is in the house. Throat scratch by mid-morning, eyes stinging. One day of it, then it lifts. | Move that day indoors — Sandy or Hood River for lunch, or stay in with a HEPA filter running. Sensitive people mask outside. |
| 1 in 108% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Grey-brown light all day, headlights on at noon, sun a red disc. Ash flecks on car hoods. Air feels heavy indoors too if the house isn't sealed. | Bail on outdoor plans entirely, or cut the trip short and drive out west on US-26 toward Sandy, which is upwind of the crest. |
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 (1,915 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 Aug 23 · Austin Aug 23 · The Narrows Aug 23 · Mitchell Aug 16. The oldest is Mitchell, 8 days behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Aug 25, 4:46 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 (+27 on the likely worst day) across 16 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 dominant mechanism this weekend is not long-range transport, it is local pooling: winds are forecast at 0–3 mph from the N/NW/WNW, which is too weak to ventilate the Zigzag valley but also too weak to import a big plume, and the forecast already says 'patchy smoke' overnight — that is nocturnal drainage from the small nearby fires settling into the valley and burning off by midday, which is exactly the signature that produces 24-hour averages in the 50–90 band and is what the 58 at Multorpor is measuring right now. I explicitly checked the bearings rather than assuming the mountain protects the house: Grasshopper (93,744 acres) and WEST 8 are the only fires east of the crest, and the ensembles show 4% offshore member-days against a 31% climatological rate — a 27-point negative departure, with literally zero offshore members on the 28th and 29th — so the big fire is the least of the problems and I am weighting the east-wind route down hard rather than fattening that tail out of habit. The fires that actually matter are Mitchell, The Narrows and Austin to the S/SSW at 12–19 miles and Sweetwater and Vaughan to the W/WSW at 19–32 miles, all on the same side of the crest as the house; Austin at 6,909 acres and 0% contained is the single most consequential object in the pack, because a wind-driven northward run up the Salmon drainage needs no synoptic help to reach Welches.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 33 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 43 · 2024: 28 · 2023: 29 · 2022: 30.
We are forecasting a worst day of 69, 36 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 12.5 mi | Mitchell S | 16 acres |
| 13.9 mi | The Narrows SSW | 241 acres · 0% contained |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,744 acres · 76% contained |
| 18.6 mi | Austin S | 6,909 acres · 0% contained |
| 19.3 mi | Sweetwater W | size not yet reported |
| 31.5 mi | Vaughan WSW | size not yet reported |
| 37.0 mi | High Lava N | 1,915 acres · 25% contained |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 2 of the nearby fires (Sweetwater, Vaughan) 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 | 5.7 mi |
| Brightwood | 10.9 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 | 18 / 15 | 10 Clear | Good | – steady | 102 mi · The Narrows |
| Cannon Beach coast | 22 / 19 | 17 Clear | Good | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Hood River east of crest | 22 / 15 | 61 Hazy | Moderate | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Manzanita coast | 24 / 22 | 17 Clear | Good | ▼ clearing | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 24 / 21 | 17 Clear | Good | ▼ clearing | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Astoria coast | 24 / 21 | 23 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 27 / 24 | 23 Clear | — | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 29 / 21 | 62 Hazy | Moderate | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Silver Falls valley | 50 / 37 | 73 Hazy | Moderate | – steady | 32 mi · Austin |
| Portland valley | 54 / 44 | 61 Hazy | Moderate | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 56 / 40 | 56 Hazy | Moderate | ▼ clearing | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 123 / 72 | 63 Hazy | Moderate | – steady | 22 mi · Akawa Butte |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 08/25/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 08/25/26 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 2026-08-29 | 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 25 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 61, 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 50 scored forecast-days, the air-quality model beat both simple baselines at 4 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 AQI for PM2.5 as a 24-hour average — the single highest 24-hour AQI value touching any one calendar day of August 28, 29 and 30, 2026, at the house in Welches/Mt Hood Village — and reporting the worst of those three days, not their average. All numbers are on the local monitor scale, i.e. what the AirNow or PurpleAir app on your phone will display, already calibrated from the raw model output by the 0.55 factor in the pack; I have applied no further bias correction of my own.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.