First, a flag: this request asks about August 28-30, 2026, which is 61 days before today's date of October 28, so this is a reconstruction of what the weekend most likely looked like, not a live forecast. Three large fires were burning within 46 miles of the house that weekend — one of them, the Austin fire near Austin Hot Springs, on the same west side of the Cascade crest as the house, with no mountain in between — so some smoke haze was more likely than not, with milky skies and a campfire smell in the morning before the afternoon westerly breeze cleaned it out.
The most likely worst day was around 60 on the air-quality index, which is the 'sensitive groups take it easy' range, with roughly a one-in-five chance one of the three days crossed 100 and about one-in-ten that a day went past 150.
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 1033% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp-edged all three days, blue sky, no smell; marine air pushing up the Sandy valley with an afternoon west breeze. | nothing |
| 4 in 1039% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, Hood soft at the edges, faint woodsmoke smell at 8am that fades by noon; sunsets unusually orange. Everyone fine; one asthmatic friend notices. | Overnight drainage flow pools thin smoke from the Austin fire and leakage over the crest in the valley bottom; the afternoon westerly scours it. |
| 2 in 1015% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 One morning you can't see Hood at all, the sun is a disc, eyes sting on the deck. Hike is a bad idea that day; indoors is fine. | A short offshore (east) wind event pushes Grasshopper's column over the crest and down the Zigzag drainage, or Austin's column parks in the valley under an inversion for a full 24 hours. |
| 1 in 1012% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Brown-grey air, visibility under a mile, headaches, smell inside the house with windows shut. Two or three days of it. Nobody goes outside. | A multi-day east-wind ridge sets up over the Cascades during peak late-August burning in a record fire year, with Grasshopper making a big westward run or a new ignition starting west of the crest inside the Sandy/Clackamas drainages. |
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 oldest is Grasshopper, 43 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 (+26 on the likely worst day) across 79 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 core mechanism is that the US AQI is a 24-hour average, so the house needs sustained smoke in the valley, not a passing plume, to cross 100. Grasshopper is the big fire at 94k acres and 17 miles, but I checked its ring coordinates: its westernmost point is -121.60, east of Mt Hood's summit longitude of about -121.70, so the crest genuinely does sit between it and the house and it needs a reversal to offshore flow — climatologically 31% of days in this window, with no ensemble departure available either way. The fire I weight more heavily is Austin: 12,888 acres at bearing 180 and 18.3 miles, which puts it in the Clackamas drainage near Austin Hot Springs, on the house's own side of the crest, where no terrain shields anything and ordinary overnight drainage and inversion pooling is enough to lift a morning 24-hour average into the 50-90 range. Against that, late August on the west slope is dominated by onshore marine flow and a reliable afternoon westerly that ventilates the valley, and both Austin and Bench were already large and well along in containment by the trip dates, so residual rather than active-run smoke was the likelier contribution. The 2022-2025 base rate here is too thin to trust on the tail: it has 28 sampled days with zero over 100, a worst day of 56, and it excludes 2017, 2018, 2020 and 2021 entirely, so I am doubling the median anchor rather than stretching the upper tail with a bad-year multiplier the season-anomaly ratio already prohibits.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 30 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 39 · 2024: 25 · 2023: 26 · 2022: 27.
We are forecasting a worst day of 68, 38 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 16.5 mi | Fawn Stew Piles Rx - West SSW | size not yet reported |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,971 acres · 98% contained |
| 18.3 mi | Austin S | 12,888 acres · 98% contained |
| 26.3 mi | Spike Timber Sale Rx - West SSE | size not yet reported |
| 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 |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 4 of the nearby fires (Fawn Stew Piles Rx - West, Spike Timber Sale Rx - West, Triple Butte RX and 1 more) 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 | 23.2 mi |
| Brightwood | 19.2 mi |
| Welches | 17.8 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 | 9 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 19 / 17 | 9 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Newport coast | 25 / 21 | 22 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 101 mi · Austin |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 30 / 22 | 11 Clear | Good | – steady | 17 mi · Grasshopper |
| Manzanita coast | 30 / 28 | 22 Clear | — | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 31 / 27 | 22 Clear | — | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 32 / 29 | 22 Clear | — | – steady | 93 mi · Austin |
| Hood River east of crest | 46 / 30 | 24 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Silver Falls valley | 50 / 37 | 12 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 31 mi · Austin |
| Portland valley | 67 / 54 | 22 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 76 / 53 | 18 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 57 mi · Austin |
| Bend east of crest | 78 / 45 | 27 Clear | — | – steady | 36 mi · Bench |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/28/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/28/26 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 2026-11-01 | 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 28 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 56, 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 370 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 forecast the US EPA AQI for PM2.5 as a 24-hour average quantity — specifically the highest 24-hour AQI value touching each calendar day at the house at 45.3201, -121.9561 in Welches, Oregon — and I report the worst single one of the three trip days, not the three-day mean. All numbers are on the local monitor scale that a phone app would display, taken as already calibrated from the model scale in the evidence pack; I applied no further bias correction of my own and did not re-apply the 0.5 factor. Separately, I note that the trip dates of 2026-08-28 through 2026-08-30 fall 61 days before today's 2026-10-28, so every number above is a retrospective estimate of what those days most likely were, not a forward forecast.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.