The valley around the house is sitting in a haze right now, and nothing in the next week looks likely to fully clear it or dramatically worsen it. Expect most of the weekend to look like a milky sky, orange sunsets and a faint campfire smell — annoying for hiking and hard on anyone with asthma, but not dangerous for healthy adults, with a roughly one-in-three chance one day tips into the range where a sensitive person should stay indoors.
The single biggest reassurance is that the wind is forecast to keep blowing off the ocean rather than out of the east, which is the pattern that turns Oregon smoke from unpleasant into serious.
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 1018% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp against blue sky from the Salmon River bridge, fog burning off by 10am and not coming back as haze, no smell. | nothing |
| 5 in 1051% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, Hood visible but washed out, faint campfire smell in the morning that fades by afternoon, vivid orange sunsets. Kids and healthy adults hike normally; asthmatics notice it. | Run a HEPA purifier in the sleeping rooms, keep windows shut overnight, move the long hike to morning. |
| 2 in 1021% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Ridge across the highway is a gray silhouette, distinct smoke smell all day, eyes and throat scratchy after an hour outside, phone app says 'Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups.' | That day becomes indoors/river-adjacent: no elevation gain, N95s for anyone with asthma, purifiers running, drive to Sandy or Portland if it stays bad. |
| 1 in 1011% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Sun a dull orange disc at noon, visibility under a mile or two, smoke indoors even with windows closed, ash flecks on car hoods, headaches by evening. | Cut the trip short or relocate west of Sandy; check Clackamas County evacuation notices and have both US-26 directions in mind before you drive. |
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 (1,717 acres, 37.2 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 Aug 21 · Austin Aug 21 · The Narrows Aug 21 · Mitchell Aug 16. The oldest is Mitchell, 5 days behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Aug 22, 3:37 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.
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 (+32 on the likely worst day) across 13 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 house is already in smoke: 77 AQI at Multorpor under near-calm NW winds, which tells you the driver here is not a dramatic transport event but local fires plus poor dispersion. Read the bearings and the terrain claim fails — Mitchell (12.5 mi S), The Narrows (13.9 mi SSW, 0% contained) and Austin (18.6 mi S, 4,808 acres, 0% contained) are all south of the house on the WEST slope, so Mt Hood shields nothing from them; only 93,562-acre Grasshopper is genuinely on the far side, and it is 76% contained and downwind under onshore flow. The forecast's overnight fog and 0-3 mph winds are a stagnation signature: nights decouple, drainage flow pools smoke in the Sandy and Salmon valleys, and the 24-hour average holds up even when afternoons look decent. Against that, the ensemble east-wind signal is the strongest single piece of evidence in the pack — 4% of member-days offshore versus 31% climatologically, a 27-point negative departure across both models — and since the 150+ and 200+ outcomes here essentially require either an offshore reversal or a fresh ignition inside 20 miles, I am cutting the upper tail materially rather than fattening it. Oregon fires at Austin's size and containment in a record drought year do not go out before September, so I do not expect the sources to disappear; equally, containment plus persistent marine push means I do not expect them to explode.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 21 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 27 · 2024: 18 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 19.
We are forecasting a worst day of 74, 53 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 12.5 mi | Mitchell S | 16 acres |
| 13.9 mi | The Narrows SSW | 212 acres · 0% contained |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,562 acres · 76% contained |
| 18.6 mi | Austin S | 4,808 acres · 0% contained |
| 37.2 mi | High Lava N | 1,717 acres · 19% contained |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 90% contained |
| 49.5 mi | Beachcomb SSE | 2,346 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 | 14.3 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 | 18 / 15 | 8 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 102 mi · The Narrows |
| Cannon Beach coast | 22 / 19 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Hood River east of crest | 22 / 15 | 47 Clear | Moderate | ▲ worsening | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Manzanita coast | 24 / 22 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 24 / 21 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Astoria coast | 24 / 21 | 15 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 27 / 24 | 15 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 29 / 21 | 37 Clear | Moderate | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Silver Falls valley | 50 / 37 | 40 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 33 mi · The Narrows |
| Portland valley | 54 / 44 | 40 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 56 / 40 | 19 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 123 / 72 | 153 Bad | Moderate | ▲ worsening | 35 mi · Crosswhite |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 08/22/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 08/22/26 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 2026-08-26 | 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, 2026-08-08 to 2026-08-21 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.342 on the coast to 1.091 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Aug 22 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 39, 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 35 scored forecast-days, the air-quality model beat both simple baselines at 4 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 highest 24-hour-average US AQI for PM2.5 that touches each calendar day at the Welches house, on the local monitor scale a phone app displays — the evidence was already calibrated from the model scale (220 modeled to 77 observed, factor 0.35) and I applied no further correction of my own. The headline worst_day_of_trip numbers are the maximum of those three daily values, not their average, because the group's decision turns on the single worst day.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.