The weekend you asked about is already behind us — it ended five days before this evidence was collected, so there is no decision left to make. Reconstructing what the air most likely did at the house, the probable outcome was hazy, campfire-smelling afternoons rather than a genuine smoke event, with a real but minority chance of one bad morning.
If you are actually asking about an upcoming weekend, give me those dates: the two uncontained fires — Austin at 12,610 acres and 0% contained, 18 miles due south, and The Narrows 14 miles SSW — are on your side of the crest, not shielded behind Mt Hood.
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 1047% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood visible from the highway, blue sky, maybe a faint brown line low over the Salmon River valley at sunrise that burns off by 10am. | nothing |
| 4 in 1038% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the ridgelines soft-edged, a faint campfire smell in the morning. Nobody healthy notices; one asthmatic in the group keeps an inhaler handy. | Do the hike in the morning, sit on the porch in the afternoon rather than the reverse. |
| 1 in 1010% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Orange sun, you cannot see Hunchback Ridge across the valley, eyes sting after an hour outside, smell of smoke indoors. | One day moved indoors — board games, drive west to Sandy or Portland for the afternoon, windows shut, box fan and furnace filter running. |
| 1 in 105% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Brown daylight, visibility under a mile, headlights on at noon, sore throat within twenty minutes outdoors, smoke inside the house no matter what you do. | Leave early or don't come; a house on US-26 in Welches has no clean-air option when the Clackamas drainages fill in. |
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), High Lava (2,894 acres, 37.0 mi N), Beachcomb (2,346 acres, 49.5 mi SSE).
An outline is only as current as the last mapping flight, which is not the same as when this page refreshed. Outlines flown — Grasshopper Aug 30 · Austin Sep 1 · The Narrows Sep 1. The oldest is Grasshopper, 2 days behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Sep 1, 6:57 AM, 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 (+9 on the likely worst day) across 24 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 framing in the brief is wrong on a checkable point and it matters: Mt Hood does not sit between this house and the fires that count. The two uncontained fires — Austin (12,610 acres, 0% contained, bearing S, 18.3 mi) and The Narrows (302 acres, 11% contained, bearing 207/SSW, 13.9 mi) — are both on the west side of the crest, upwind-adjacent along the Clackamas and Salmon River drainages, so the smoke risk here runs on southerly flow and overnight valley pooling, not on the east-wind reversal; Grasshopper (93,972 ac) and Bench (67,071 ac) are the big fires behind the mountain and both are 83-90% contained and decaying. Second, the east_wind_outlook ensemble is literally null in this pack — there is no measured departure from the 31% climatological offshore rate, so I cannot claim it as evidence in either direction and I have not; I fall back to the climatological rate and note that it is the wrong lever for the fires that actually threaten this address. Third, the anchoring: the 4-year climatology median is 17 with a worst late-August day ever recorded of 32 and zero days over 100 in 28 sampled, but the measured season anomaly (30-day mean daily max of 41 against a typical 16) says this August ran roughly 2.4x hot in local AQI, so I multiply the anchor by 3.2 — 2.4x for the season, ~1.3x for taking the worst of three days — landing at 54 rather than the climatological 17.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 17 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 22 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 15.
We are forecasting a worst day of 51, 34 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 13.9 mi | The Narrows SSW | 302 acres · 11% contained |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,972 acres · 83% contained |
| 18.3 mi | Austin S | 12,610 acres · 0% contained |
| 37.0 mi | High Lava N | 2,894 acres · 38% contained |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 90% contained |
| 49.5 mi | Beachcomb SSE | 2,346 acres · 100% contained |
| 56.7 mi | Ten Mile SE | 4,834 acres · 100% contained |
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 / 16 | 20 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 101 mi · Austin |
| Cannon Beach coast | 23 / 20 | — | Good | ▲ worsening | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Manzanita coast | 23 / 21 | — | Good | ▲ worsening | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 23 / 21 | — | Good | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 25 / 18 | 23 Clear | Good | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 28 / 18 | 15 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Astoria coast | 29 / 26 | 18 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 30 / 26 | 18 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 42 / 31 | — | Moderate | ▲ worsening | 31 mi · Austin |
| Portland valley | 46 / 37 | 23 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 48 / 34 | 23 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 90 / 53 | — | Moderate | – steady | 22 mi · Akawa Butte |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 09/02/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 09/02/26 by Oregon Dept. of Environmental Quality | Next published outlook for that reporting area — a human forecaster's call Oregon DEQ via AirNow |
| Next 5 days | today's model run, covering 2026-09-06 | 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, 2026-08-16 to 2026-08-29 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.362 on the coast to 0.799 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Sep 2 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 (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.
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 32, 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 90 scored forecast-days, the air-quality model beat both simple baselines at 2 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 US AQI for PM2.5 — a quantity defined on a 24-HOUR average concentration, not an instantaneous reading — at the house in Mt Hood Village/Welches (45.320, -121.956). For each calendar day I give the highest 24-hour AQI value touching that day, and the headline number is the single WORST such day across Aug 28-30, not the three-day average. All values are on the LOCAL MONITOR scale — what a phone app would display — since the evidence pack already applied the 0.284 model-to-monitor factor; I have applied no additional bias correction of my own. Caveat on the whole exercise: today is 2026-09-02 and the trip ran 2026-08-28 to 2026-08-30, so days_until_trip is -5 and this is a hindcast of a weekend that has already happened, not a forecast of one that is coming.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.