First, the thing that matters most: today is September 1st and the trip window was August 28-30, so this weekend is already behind you — the real answer is sitting in the monitor archive, not in a forecast. Treating it as a hindcast, the air at the house was most likely in the 50s-to-60s range on its worst day, the kind of hazy-horizon, campfire-smelling air that bothers asthmatics and little kids but does not cancel a trip for healthy adults.
The main way it could have gone genuinely bad is the uncontained Austin fire 18 miles due south feeding smoke up the valley on Sunday as southerly winds picked up ahead of the rain that arrived September 1st.
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 against blue sky from the driveway, no smell of smoke, kids outside all day. | nothing |
| 6 in 1057% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, ridgelines soft, faint campfire smell in the morning that burns off by noon; sunsets orange. | Anyone with asthma keeps an inhaler close and skips the hard hike; run the AC on recirculate; kids' hard play moved to morning or indoors. |
| 2 in 1017% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Can't see Mt Hood at all, visibility a couple of miles down US-26, throat scratchy after an hour outside, smoke smell indoors. | That day becomes an indoor day — board games, one box-fan-plus-furnace-filter running in the main room, N95s for anyone who goes out, and the two or three most sensitive people decide whether to drive down to Portland for the night. |
| 1 in 108% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Orange daylight, ash flecks on cars, sun visible as a disc, headaches by afternoon, smoke smell you can't get out of the house. | Leave early or don't come. Anyone with asthma, heart disease, a pregnancy, or a child under five should not be sleeping in that air. |
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 Aug 30 · The Narrows Aug 30. The oldest is Austin, 1 day behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Sep 1, 4:32 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 (+26 on the likely worst day) across 23 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 |
Start with the mechanism, not the acreage: the big fires here are Grasshopper (94k) and Bench (67k), and both sit east or southeast of the crest with an 11,250-foot mountain between them and the house, so their smoke needs easterly downslope flow to arrive at all — and both are 83% and 90% contained, so they are producing far less than their size suggests. The two fires that actually matter are the ones I checked the bearings on: The Narrows at bearing 207 with a perimeter centered near 45.14N, -122.09W, and Austin 18 miles due south — both are west of the crest, in the same drainage system as the house, so terrain shields nothing from them. Against that, the observed pattern is the clean one: patchy fog, near-calm westerly drift, and rain arriving Sep 1-2, all signatures of marine air pushing inland rather than offshore flow, and the east-wind ensemble that the bad case depends on came back null rather than elevated, so I have no positive evidence for a reversal and fall back to the 31% climatological offshore rate. The season anomaly of exactly 2.0 is measured in local AQI over a 30-day window that already contains the trip dates, which is why I trust it more than the four-year climatology; that climatology has never seen a day over 100 in this window, but it also begins in 2022 and has never seen 2020, so I am not treating its zero as a measured zero.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 22 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 28 · 2024: 18 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 20.
We are forecasting a worst day of 68, 46 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 13.9 mi | The Narrows SSW | 301 acres · 11% contained |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,972 acres · 83% contained |
| 18.3 mi | Austin S | 12,316 acres · 0% contained |
| 37.0 mi | High Lava N | 2,894 acres · 30% 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 | 27 Clear | Good | – steady | 101 mi · Austin |
| Cannon Beach coast | 23 / 20 | 22 Clear | Good | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Manzanita coast | 23 / 21 | 22 Clear | Good | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 23 / 21 | 22 Clear | Good | – steady | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 25 / 18 | 52 Hazy | Good | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 28 / 18 | 57 Hazy | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Astoria coast | 29 / 26 | 21 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 30 / 26 | 21 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 42 / 31 | 33 Clear | Moderate | ▼ clearing | 31 mi · Austin |
| Portland valley | 46 / 37 | 46 Clear | Good | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 48 / 34 | 32 Clear | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 90 / 53 | 76 Hazy | Sensitive groups | – steady | 22 mi · Akawa Butte |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 09/01/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 09/01/26 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 2026-09-05 | 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 1 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 40, 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 85 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 highest 24-hour-average US AQI for PM2.5 that touches any of August 28, 29, or 30, 2026, at the Welches house — reported on the local monitor scale, the number a phone app would display, with the model-to-monitor calibration already applied and no further bias correction of my own. I report the worst single one of those three days, not their average. And I am noting plainly that all three dates are already past as of today, September 1, 2026, so this is a hindcast of a decision that has already been made.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.