A very large fire is burning about seventeen miles east of the house, and it will almost certainly still be burning during your trip. Right now the ocean air is winning — the monitor eight miles up the road reads 13, which is genuinely clean, and that onshore pattern is the normal late-August setup, so the most likely version of your weekend is a slightly hazy sky and nobody changing plans.
The thing that would wreck it is an east wind, which happens a few times each Oregon summer and would push that fire's smoke straight down US-26 into town; there is roughly a one-in-four chance at least one of your three days is genuinely bad.
If we ran this weekend 100 times, here is how they would split. Hover a row to pick it out of the dots.
| 5 in 1051% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp against blue sky, maybe a thin brown line low on the eastern horizon in the morning that burns off by ten. Kids outside all day, nobody mentions it. | nothing |
| 3 in 1028% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, orange-ish sun, the far ridges look flat and washed out, and you can faintly smell campfire in the morning air. Sensitive people notice a scratchy throat; everyone else has a normal weekend. | Move the long hike to the morning, run the house fans on recirculate, and hand out masks to the two people with asthma. |
| 1 in 1013% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 You wake up Saturday and can't see the ridge across the valley; smoke has pooled in the Zigzag/Salmon river bottom overnight. Air smells strongly of smoke, eyes sting, it thins some by late afternoon. | That day becomes an indoor day: no hiking, no river, purifier running, windows shut. Trip still happens; one day gets sacrificed. |
| 1 in 109% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Persistent orange half-light, ash flecks on the car, headlights on at noon, sun a dull red disk. Smoke doesn't clear in the afternoon because the wind itself is delivering it. Possible Level 1 'Be Ready' notices in the corridor. | Cancel or cut short. This is a leave-early call, not a stay-inside call, and it's driven by an east wind that is also a fire-spread threat. |
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 (1,211 acres, 38.9 mi NNW).
An outline is only as current as the last mapping flight, which is not the same as when this page refreshed. Last mapped — Grasshopper Aug 11 · Austin Aug 10 · Mitchell Aug 9 · The Narrows Aug 8. The oldest of these is The Narrows, 4 days behind.
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 (+6 on the likely worst day) across 4 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 |
| Aug 15 | 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 whole forecast hinges on one fire and one wind direction. Grasshopper is 83,642 acres at 20% containment and 17.4 miles due east — and I checked the bearing rather than trusting the terrain note: due east at 45.32°N places it SOUTH of Mt Hood's summit, so the mountain is not between the house and the fire; the crest on that line is the low Barlow/Bennett Pass gap that channels directly down the Zigzag valley into Welches. Under the prevailing late-August marine regime the afternoon westerlies vent that valley eastward and the fire's smoke goes to central Oregon, which is precisely the evidence we have today: 84,000 acres burning 17 miles away and the Government Camp monitor reads 13. Against that, Welches sits in a river bottom that pools cold air, so on stable nights even a modest downslope drainage can settle smoke into town until midday — that mechanism alone produces the 50–100 days that are my central case, and NWS is already carrying 'Patchy Smoke' in the near-term forecast. The genuine tail is a thermal-trough east-wind event, the same pattern that drove Oregon's 2017 and 2020 disasters; such events occur a few times a season and last 1–3 days, giving maybe a 15–20% chance of overlapping this specific window, and if one lands, a fire directly upwind at 17 miles is a direct hit rather than a distant haze. I have also left room for a new ignition closer than the current ones — 15 days is plenty of lead time, and the small Regan Hill incident sits 17.8 miles WEST, on the upwind side, where acreage counts for far more.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 12 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 16 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 11.
We are forecasting a worst day of 48, 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 |
| 14.0 mi | The Narrows SSW | 5 acres |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 83,642 acres · 20% contained |
| 17.8 mi | Regan Hill W | size not yet reported |
| 19.4 mi | Austin S | 719 acres · 0% contained |
| 20.4 mi | Austin Non-Stat S | size not yet reported |
| 27.1 mi | Gorton Creek NNE | size not yet reported |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 3 of the nearby fires (Regan Hill, Austin Non-Stat, Gorton Creek) 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 | 14.3 mi |
Distance from each point on the drive in to the nearest fire. TripCheck is the authority on closures.
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.
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 quantity at the house in Welches, Oregon — for each calendar day, the highest 24-hour AQI value touching that day, on the local monitor scale a phone app would display (already calibrated from the model scale; I applied no further correction). 'Worst day of trip' is the single largest 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.