The air at the house right now is already lightly smoky from small fires burning 12 to 19 miles to the south, on the same side of the mountain as you, and those fires will still be burning next weekend. The good news is that the long-range models show almost no sign of the east wind that would push the big fire's smoke over Mt Hood onto the house — that risk looks well below a normal late-August weekend.
Most likely you get mornings with a visible haze and a campfire smell that burns off by afternoon, roughly AQI 55 to 75, which is fine for healthy adults but noticeable for anyone with asthma.
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 1030% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp against blue sky all three days; maybe a faint smell at dawn that is gone by breakfast; nobody mentions the air. | nothing |
| 5 in 1046% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the ridge across the valley looks flat and blue-grey, faint campfire smell in the morning that clears by mid-afternoon; a couple of people with allergies or asthma feel it. | Keep the windows shut overnight and in the morning, run a purifier in the sleeping rooms, move the hard hike to the afternoon. |
| 2 in 1016% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 You can smell smoke indoors, the sun is an orange disc, visibility down to a mile or two, eyes and throat scratchy; one day is clearly worse than the others. | That day becomes an indoor day — cards, cooking, a drive west toward Sandy or Portland where the air is usually cleaner. N95s for anyone outside more than a few minutes. |
| 1 in 108% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Ash or a smoke pall that never lifts, headaches, everyone coughing, streetlights on at midday; the group is arguing about leaving. | Cut the trip short or relocate. Watch for Level 1 evacuation notices in the Hoodland corridor and keep cars pointed downhill toward Sandy. |
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 18 · Austin Aug 18 · The Narrows Aug 18 · Mitchell Aug 16. The oldest is Mitchell, 4 days behind. Acreage and containment are refreshed far more often than the outlines are re-flown — those figures were last updated Aug 21, 3:36 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 (+18 on the likely worst day) across 12 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 |
| Aug 22 | Air-quality / smoke model (CAMS) actual AQI at the house · reaches 6 days out |
The house's smoke comes from two separate mechanisms and they have to be judged separately. The big one — Grasshopper's 93,000 acres 17 miles east — needs an easterly flow to cross an 11,250-foot barrier, and the ensembles show that flow on 2% of member-days versus 31% climatologically for this window, a genuine 29-point negative departure that argues hard against the catastrophic case. But the terrain note is misleading about the rest: Mitchell (12.5 mi S), The Narrows (14 mi SSW, 0% contained) and Austin (18.6 mi S, 4,255 acres, 0% contained) sit on the same side of the crest as the house, upvalley of it, and need no wind event at all — nocturnal cold-air drainage pools their smoke in the Zigzag valley overnight and it burns off in the afternoon, which is exactly the 55 currently being measured at Multorpor and the 'patchy smoke' in the near-term forecast. Late-August Oregon fires this size do not go out; the season-ending west-slope rain is normally mid-to-late September, so I assume all of these are still producing smoke on Aug 28-30, with Grasshopper's contribution decaying as containment climbs past 71%. That gives a most-likely weekend of moderate morning haze in the 55-75 range, which is why I depart from an 18 climatological median by a factor of about 3.6 rather than treating this as a normal weekend.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 18 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 23 · 2024: 15 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 16.
We are forecasting a worst day of 60, 42 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 12.5 mi | Mitchell S | 16 acres |
| 14.0 mi | The Narrows SSW | 178 acres · 0% contained |
| 16.9 mi | Bronze W | size not yet reported |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 92,918 acres · 71% contained |
| 18.6 mi | Austin S | 4,255 acres · 0% contained |
| 37.2 mi | High Lava N | 1,717 acres · 19% contained |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 90% contained |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 1 of the nearby fires (Bronze) 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 | 15.6 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 | 20 / 17 | 12 Clear | Good | – steady | 102 mi · The Narrows |
| Manzanita coast | 22 / 21 | 18 Clear | Good | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 23 / 20 | 18 Clear | Good | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 23 / 20 | 18 Clear | Good | – steady | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Astoria coast | 26 / 23 | 21 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 27 / 24 | 21 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 37 / 28 | 52 Hazy | Moderate | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Silver Falls valley | 45 / 33 | 45 Clear | Good | – steady | 33 mi · The Narrows |
| Portland valley | 48 / 38 | 54 Hazy | Good | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| McMinnville valley | 53 / 37 | 44 Clear | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 119 / 70 | 173 Bad | Moderate | ▼ clearing | 35 mi · Crosswhite |
| Hood River east of crest | n/a | 58 Hazy | Sensitive groups | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 08/21/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 08/21/26 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 2026-08-25 | 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, 2026-07-31 to 2026-08-13 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.375 on the coast to 1.056 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Aug 21 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 33, 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 30 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 any single calendar day of Aug 28, 29 or 30, 2026, at the Welches house — one number per day, the worst of the three being the decision number — expressed on the local monitor scale that a phone app like AirNow would display, with no further bias correction applied by me on top of the calibration already in the evidence.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.