First, a flag the group should see: the pack is dated October 26 and the trip was August 28-30, so these dates are 59 days in the past and the fire and weather data in front of me were collected in mid-September, after the trip ended. Treating it as a forward-looking call anyway, the most likely worst day at the house was hazy-but-usable air in the 70s, with roughly a one-in-three chance that one day crossed into the unhealthy-for-sensitive-groups range and about one-in-six that a real smoke episode landed on the weekend.
Two of the nearby fires sat south and southwest of the house, on the same side of the Cascade crest, so Mt Hood would not have shielded the place from them.
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 1019% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp all three days, normal blue sky, campfire smell only from your own fire ring, no sore throats | nothing |
| 4 in 1043% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the mountain's outline soft, a faint smoke smell on the morning walk that burns off by noon; most people feel nothing, a couple of asthmatics notice | Keep windows shut overnight and in the early morning, do the hike before 11am, run a box-fan filter in the sleeping rooms |
| 2 in 1022% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 One day where the ridge across the river goes gray, the sun is orange at midday, eyes sting outside; the other two days are merely hazy | Move that day indoors, cancel the hike, drive west to Sandy or Portland for the afternoon if anyone is struggling |
| 2 in 1017% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Smoke you can taste, visibility under a mile, headlights on at noon, everyone coughing, kids and older guests clearly unwell indoors too | Leave early or relocate west of Sandy; a house without filtration is not usable at this level |
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, 41 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 (+48 on the likely worst day) across 77 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 reaches this house by one of two routes: offshore east-northeast flow dragging the 94,000-acre Grasshopper fire's output over and around Mt Hood, or a south-to-southwest wind carrying the Austin and Narrows fires' smoke up the Sandy and Salmon valleys — and those two sit on the same side of the crest as the house, so the terrain note in the pack is only half true. Against that, the default late-August pattern here is onshore marine flow about 69% of member-days, which both ventilates the valley each afternoon and keeps the crest an effective wall; offshore flow at 31% is the climatological rate and no ensemble was provided to tell me whether this particular weekend was running above or below it, so I took no credit either way. The season-anomaly ratio of 1.0 would normally argue for sitting right on the 62 anchor, but it was computed over the last 30 days — late September into October, after the first rains — and so cannot speak to late-August air; what it does not price is three fires inside 19 miles in fully cured fuels during a record state fire year at national preparedness level 5. That earns a 1.25 multiplier to a worst-day p50 of 78, modal outcome a hazy weekend nobody cancels.
A normal late August here is Hazy - median AQI 62 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 80 · 2024: 52 · 2023: 55 · 2022: 56.
We are forecasting a worst day of 90, 28 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 |
| 32.4 mi | Triple Butte RX SSE | size not yet reported |
| 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 |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 2 of the nearby fires (Triple Butte RX, Muddy Run 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 | 14 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 19 / 17 | 14 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Newport coast | 25 / 21 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 101 mi · Austin |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 30 / 22 | 14 Clear | Good | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Manzanita coast | 30 / 28 | 14 Clear | — | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 31 / 27 | 14 Clear | — | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 32 / 29 | 14 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 46 / 30 | 32 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Silver Falls valley | 50 / 37 | 25 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 31 mi · Austin |
| Portland valley | 67 / 54 | 59 Hazy | Good | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 76 / 53 | 12 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 78 / 45 | 16 Clear | — | – steady | 36 mi · Bench |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/26/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/26/26 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 2026-10-30 | 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 26 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 (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 114, 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 360 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 single highest 24-hour-average US AQI for PM2.5 at the house in Welches (45.320, -121.956) — the worst one of Aug 28, 29 and 30, not the three-day average — expressed on the local monitor scale a phone app would display, already calibrated by the 1.031 factor in the pack with no further bias correction of my own.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.