The dates you gave me, August 28–30, are almost two months behind us; today is October 20. So the only honest answer is that this is a hindcast, not a forecast — and you can replace it entirely with what the monitors actually recorded that weekend, which is free and certain.
If you want the number I'd have produced on August 25 from this evidence, it points to a hazy-but-breathable worst day with a real but minority chance of one genuinely smoky day, because three large fires to the east and south were still open then even though they read 90–98 percent contained in mid-September figures.
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 1023% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp-edged all three days, blue sky to the ridgeline, no smell of smoke on the deck in the morning. | nothing |
| 4 in 1045% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, Hood visible but soft, a faint campfire smell at dawn in the Sandy River bottom that burns off by 11am; sunsets orange. | Kids and anyone with asthma do easy hikes instead of the Mirror Lake climb; windows shut overnight. |
| 2 in 1019% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 One morning you can't see Hood at all, ridgeline across US-26 is a grey outline, eyes sting after an hour outside. | That day moves indoors — board games, Sandy or Portland for the afternoon. The other two days are normal. |
| 1 in 1014% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Daylight goes brown-orange, visibility under a mile, ash flecks on car hoods, smoke indoors despite closed windows. | Anyone with asthma, anyone pregnant, and small kids should not be there; the group either leaves west of Sandy or cancels. |
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, 35 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 (+38 on the likely worst day) across 71 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 |
First the thing that dominates everything else: today is 2026-10-20 and the trip window closed on 2026-08-30, so there is no decision left to inform and the measured record should be used instead of any estimate. Reading the pack as of late August anyway, the mechanism that matters is Grasshopper — 93,971 acres at 17.4 miles due east, on the far side of an 11,250-ft peak, so terrain does help, but smoke crosses at gap level through the Zigzag and Hood River corridors rather than over the summit, and the 98% containment figure is dated Sept 17, three weeks after the trip, so that fire was materially more open on Aug 28. Austin (12,888 acres, 18.3 miles S) and The Narrows (13.9 miles SSW) are on the house's own side of the crest, which is why I do not credit terrain as a shield; southerly flow or overnight drainage pooling in the Sandy valley can deliver their smoke without any easterly reversal at all. Against that, the local observed record is genuinely reassuring: 28 sampled days in this calendar window show 0% over 100 with a worst day of 99, by-year means of 44–69, and the single highest year is 2025 at 69 — so the stated climatological p90 of 197 cannot come from the same 28-day sample and I treat it as model-scale or wider-pool, not as a measured local tail. The east-wind ensemble is null, so I get no departure signal and must fall back on the 31% climatological offshore rate, which leaves the reversal branch at its base rate rather than discounted.
A normal late August here is Hazy - median AQI 53 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 69 · 2024: 44 · 2023: 47 · 2022: 48.
We are forecasting a worst day of 80, 27 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 |
| 59.5 mi | 407 Det S | 31 acres |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 1 of the nearby fires (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 |
| Newport coast | 20 / 17 | 17 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 101 mi · Austin |
| Astoria coast | 21 / 18 | 13 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 22 / 19 | 13 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 23 / 17 | 33 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Manzanita coast | 29 / 27 | 27 Clear | — | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 31 / 27 | 27 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 31 / 28 | 27 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 42 / 28 | 24 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Portland valley | 47 / 38 | 55 Hazy | Good | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 53 / 39 | 48 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 31 mi · Austin |
| McMinnville valley | 55 / 38 | 33 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 58 / 34 | 40 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · Bench |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/20/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/20/26 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 2026-10-24 | 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, 2026-10-01 to 2026-10-14 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.37 on the coast to 0.768 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Oct 20 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 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 330 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 estimating the US EPA AQI for PM2.5 — a 24-hour-average pollutant concentration converted to the AQI index — taking for each calendar day the highest 24-hour AQI value touching that day at the Welches house, then reporting the single worst of the three trip days rather than their average. All values are on the local monitor scale a phone app would display, already bias-corrected by the supplied 0.889 factor, with no further correction applied by me. The dates in question, 2026-08-28 through 2026-08-30, are in the past relative to today, 2026-10-20.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.