The fires near the house are nearly all buttoned up, and the ones with real acreage sit on the far side of Mt Hood, so smoke only reaches Welches if the wind flips around and blows from the east. The most likely weekend is clear-to-slightly-hazy air, around the seasonal normal for late August, with one day a bit worse than the others.
The honest caveat: these dates are six weeks in the past relative to when this was built, and nobody fed in what the monitors actually recorded on August 28-30, so treat this as a reconstruction of what was knowable, not a live call.
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 1028% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp against blue sky from the Salmon River valley, no smell of smoke, maybe thin morning fog that burns off by 10am. | nothing |
| 4 in 1044% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the ridgelines soft rather than crisp, a faint campfire smell at dawn that lifts by midday; sunsets unusually orange. | Keep the hike shorter and earlier; anyone with asthma takes it easy in the afternoon. |
| 2 in 1017% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 One day where the far side of the golf course is hard to see, eyes and throat scratchy outdoors, smoke smell indoors unless windows stay shut. | Trade that day's outdoor plan for indoors, windows closed, run a HEPA or box-fan filter, N95s for anyone who goes out. |
| 1 in 1012% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Brown-grey ceiling, sun a dim disc, under a mile of visibility down US-26, headaches and coughing in otherwise healthy people. | The trip stops being outdoors. Sensitive members should leave; the rest shelter with filtration or drive west out of the valley. |
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, 24 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 (+28 on the likely worst day) across 60 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 |
Smoke only reaches this house by one of two routes, and they are not the same. The big fire — Grasshopper, 93,971 acres, 17.4 miles due east — is beyond the Mt Hood crest, so it needs an offshore east-to-northeast gradient to deliver anything, and late August here is still dominated by onshore marine flow; the climatological offshore rate for this window is 31% of days (22-44% by year), and because the ensemble field came back null I have no 2026-specific departure from that rate to lean on in either direction, so I priced the climatological rate rather than inventing a signal. The second route matters more than terrain reasoning suggests: Austin (12,888 acres, 18.3 miles south, near 45.05N/-121.95W) and Kleinsmith (12.9 miles west) are on the house's own side of the crest with nothing between them and Welches, and the Salmon/Zigzag valley floor pools smoke under the light-wind nocturnal inversions typical of that week — a local mechanism that can push a 24-hour average to 100+ without any synoptic wind reversal at all. Against that, every mapped fire with a number on it is at 95-98% containment and so has steeply declining emissions, and the 28-day historical sample for this exact calendar window has never recorded a day over 100 (worst seen: 99), which is why I weight the two benign scenarios at 0.68 combined rather than fattening the tail.
A normal late August here is Hazy - median AQI 54 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 70 · 2024: 45 · 2023: 47 · 2022: 48.
We are forecasting a worst day of 70, 16 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 12.9 mi | Kleinsmith W | size not yet reported |
| 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 |
| 32.4 mi | Triple Butte RX SSE | size not yet reported |
| 37.0 mi | High Lava N | 2,899 acres · 95% contained |
| 53.8 mi | Celilo Park ENE | size not yet reported |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 3 of the nearby fires (Kleinsmith, Triple Butte RX, Celilo Park) 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 | 5.2 mi |
| Brightwood | 5.2 mi |
| Welches | 11.3 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 |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 20 / 15 | 38 Clear | Good | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Newport coast | 20 / 17 | 24 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 101 mi · Austin |
| Astoria coast | 25 / 22 | 9 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 25 / 22 | 9 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Manzanita coast | 26 / 24 | — | — | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 28 / 24 | — | — | ▲ worsening | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 29 / 26 | — | — | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 40 / 26 | 38 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| McMinnville valley | 45 / 32 | — | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Portland valley | 46 / 37 | 38 Clear | Good | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 49 / 36 | — | — | – steady | 31 mi · Austin |
| Bend east of crest | 56 / 33 | — | — | – steady | 35 mi · Crosswhite |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/09/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/09/26 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 2026-10-13 | 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 9 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 (Portland, 37.1 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 99, 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 275 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 forecast the US EPA AQI for PM2.5 as a 24-hour average — not an hourly spot reading — at the house in Mt Hood Village/Welches (45.3201N, 121.9561W), taking for each calendar day the highest 24-hour AQI value that touches that day, then reporting the single worst such day across August 28-30, 2026. All numbers are on the local monitor scale a phone app would display, already calibrated by the 0.893 factor in the evidence pack; I applied no further bias correction of my own. Note that the stated calibration was fit at the Portland monitor 37 miles away, not at the house, which adds uncertainty I have not tried to remove.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.