Most likely the weekend looks hazy rather than dangerous: milky sky, smoky smell in the early morning, fine by afternoon. The nearby fires are large enough and the year dry enough that one of the three days could turn genuinely smoky, with a roughly one-in-four chance of a day where sensitive people should stay indoors.
Keep the booking, bring the gear, and make the final call two or three days out when the actual wind pattern is visible.
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 1026% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Blue sky, Mt Hood visible from the highway, cool marine air coming up the Sandy valley at night; no smoke smell. | nothing |
| 4 in 1036% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Whitish-gray sky, flattened sun, faint campfire smell at breakfast that clears by midday; the ridge across the valley looks washed out. | Open windows at night instead of midday, move the long hike to the morning, keep kids and anyone with asthma off hard exertion in the afternoon. |
| 2 in 1020% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Orange-tinted sun, visibility a mile or two, smoke smell indoors, eyes and throat scratchy; you can taste it on the porch. | One day moved indoors: board games, a drive west toward Portland or the coast for the afternoon, box fan and furnace filter running in the main room. |
| 2 in 1017% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Brown-gray pall, ridges invisible, headache and cough for several people, smoke visibly layered in the trees all day. | Anyone with asthma, a heart condition, a pregnancy or a small child should leave; the rest shorten the trip or relocate west of Sandy. |
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), 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, 42 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 (+31 on the likely worst day) across 78 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 climatological median daily-max here is 26 with a p90 of 96 and no day over 100 in 28 sampled days, which is a genuinely benign baseline for a west-slope Cascade village normally ventilated by marine air. But this base rate comes from only four years and has never seen the configuration actually present in 2026: Grasshopper at 93,971 acres 17 miles due east, Austin at 12,888 acres 18 miles south, and The Narrows 14 miles SSW — and Austin and The Narrows are on the same, western, side of the crest, so Mt Hood shields the house from neither of them and no wind reversal is required for their smoke to arrive. The dominant mechanism for a bad day is not a dramatic plume but overnight valley drainage and inversion pooling smoke in the Sandy/Zigzag trench, which lifts the 24-hour average while the afternoon still looks merely hazy; the second mechanism is an offshore/easterly episode, climatologically 31% of days in this window, carrying Grasshopper's smoke downslope over the crest. Against that, the base state is onshore flow with these fires on a containment trajectory, which is why the modal outcome remains hazy-but-fine rather than smoky. I therefore multiply the 26 anchor by about 2.2 to a worst-day p50 of 57 and fatten the upper tail to a p90 of 168, reflecting the explicitly under-sampled archive and roughly four weeks of remaining lead time in which a new fire can start closer to the house under constrained initial attack at national preparedness level 5.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 26 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 34 · 2024: 22 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 24.
We are forecasting a worst day of 73, 47 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 · 100% contained |
| 44.1 mi | Muddy Run RX SSE | size not yet reported |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 90% contained |
| 50.2 mi | Tule RX ESE | size not yet reported |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 2 of the nearby fires (Muddy Run RX, Tule RX) 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 | 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 |
| Astoria coast | 19 / 16 | 11 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 19 / 17 | 11 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Newport coast | 25 / 21 | 10 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 101 mi · Austin |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 30 / 22 | 10 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Manzanita coast | 30 / 28 | 13 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 31 / 27 | 13 Clear | — | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 32 / 29 | 13 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 46 / 30 | 22 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Silver Falls valley | 50 / 37 | 10 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 31 mi · Austin |
| Portland valley | 67 / 54 | 27 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 76 / 53 | 18 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 78 / 45 | 14 Clear | — | – steady | 36 mi · Bench |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/27/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/27/26 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 2026-10-31 | 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, 2026-10-09 to 2026-10-22 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.351 on the coast to 1.066 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Oct 27 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 (Estacada, 18.3 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 49, 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 365 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 highest 24-hour-average US AQI for PM2.5 touching any of August 28, 29 or 30, 2026, at the house in Welches (45.320, -121.956), expressed on the local monitor scale a phone app would display — already calibrated, with no further bias correction applied — and I am reporting the single worst of those three days, not their average.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.