The trip weekend of August 28-30 has already happened, so this is a backward-looking estimate rather than a live forecast, and the fire numbers in the evidence pack were measured in mid-September, two to three weeks after the group would have been at the house. On the weekend itself, two fires were burning on the same side of the Cascade crest as the house (one about 18 miles south, one much larger 17 miles east behind Mount Hood), in Oregon's record fire year with fully cured fuels.
The most likely experience was visible haze and hazy sunsets but breathable air, with a real minority chance that an offshore east-wind episode pushed one day into the range where sensitive people should stay indoors.
If we ran this weekend 100 times, here is how they would split. Hover a row to pick it out of the dots.
| 4 in 1041% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mount Hood sharp and visible from the highway, normal blue sky, maybe a faint smell of smoke on a still morning that burns off by 10am. | nothing |
| 3 in 1032% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, flat light, orange sunsets, the ridgelines across the valley look washed out; you can smell smoke outdoors but nobody's eyes sting and hikes are fine. | Keep the hard cardio to the morning, close windows overnight, run a purifier in whichever bedroom has the asthmatic in it. |
| 2 in 1016% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Visibility down to a couple of miles, sun a dull disc, smoke smell indoors, throats scratchy by afternoon; one day of it, better the next. | That day moves indoors - board games, drive to Portland or the coast for the afternoon, masks for anyone walking the dog, no trail runs. |
| 1 in 1011% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Brown-grey air, can't see the far side of the valley, headaches and coughing for healthy adults, smoke gets into the house no matter what you do. | Cut the weekend short or relocate west of Portland; anyone with asthma, a pregnancy, or a kid under five should not be there. |
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: 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 Narrows Sep 15. The oldest is The Narrows, 28 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 (+9 on the likely worst day) across 64 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 10 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 decisive mechanism is transport, not fire size: the 93,971-acre Grasshopper fire sits 17 miles east, which puts it beyond the Cascade crest, so its smoke reaches this house only when the pressure gradient flips offshore and pushes east-northeast flow over the crest and through the Gorge - climatologically 31% of days in this window, with no trip-date ensemble in the pack to revise that up or down. But the 12,888-acre Austin fire 18 miles south and the Narrows fire 14 miles south-southwest are on the SAME west slope as the house, in the Clackamas and upper Sandy drainages, and they need no reversal at all - any southerly component, or simply the strong nocturnal inversion that pools drainage air in the Sandy/Salmon valley, loads the 24-hour average without a wind event. Against that, late August on the west slope is normally ventilated: onshore flow or a marine push scours the valley most afternoons, and in 2022-2025 this location never exceeded 31 on 28 sampled days in this exact calendar window. The containment figures that look reassuring (98%/98%/98%) are dated September 15-17 and describe the fires' endgame; a fire that reached nearly 94,000 acres was almost certainly still active on August 28-30, which is the single biggest reason I depart upward from the 17 anchor.
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 | 304 acres · 98% contained |
| 17.4 mi | Grasshopper E | 93,971 acres · 98% contained |
| 18.3 mi | Austin S | 12,888 acres · 98% contained |
| 37.0 mi | High Lava N | 2,899 acres · 95% 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 |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 20 / 15 | 12 Clear | Good | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Newport coast | 20 / 17 | 13 Clear | Good | – steady | 101 mi · Austin |
| Astoria coast | 25 / 22 | 22 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 25 / 22 | 22 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Manzanita coast | 26 / 24 | 32 Clear | — | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 28 / 24 | 32 Clear | — | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 29 / 26 | 32 Clear | — | – steady | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 40 / 26 | 27 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| McMinnville valley | 45 / 32 | 52 Hazy | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Portland valley | 46 / 37 | 59 Hazy | Good | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 49 / 36 | 28 Clear | — | – steady | 31 mi · Austin |
| Bend east of crest | 56 / 33 | 37 Clear | — | – steady | 35 mi · Crosswhite |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/13/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/13/26 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 2026-10-17 | 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, 2026-09-24 to 2026-10-07 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.37 on the coast to 0.694 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Oct 13 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 31, 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 295 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 forecasting the US AQI for PM2.5 as a 24-hour average - specifically the highest 24-hour AQI value touching each calendar day - at the house in Mt Hood Village/Welches, on the local monitor scale a phone app would display (already calibrated to the Multorpor station 8.7 miles away, with no further bias correction applied by me). The headline number is the single worst of the three trip days (Aug 28, 29, 30), not their average.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.