Three large fires sit within 20 to 45 miles of the house, and in a record Oregon fire year that is the real reason for caution. Most late-August days at Welches are flushed by onshore air off the Pacific, which keeps the valley clean even while those fires smolder; the bad version needs the wind to flip and come down off the east side of Mt Hood.
Odds are roughly three in four that your worst day is merely hazy or better, and about one in four that one day is bad enough that the group should stay indoors in the afternoon.
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 1044% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Mt Hood sharp against blue sky, maybe a thin high haze at sunset; nobody notices the air. | nothing |
| 3 in 1032% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the ridgelines across the valley go soft, faint campfire smell in the morning before it mixes out. | Kids, older guests and anyone with asthma take it easy in the afternoon; close windows overnight and run the AC on recirculate. |
| 1 in 1014% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Orange-tinted sun, visibility a mile or two, eyes and throat scratchy within an hour outside. | Hike early or skip it, move the day indoors, run a HEPA purifier in the main room and the kids' bedroom, N95s for anyone outside more than a few minutes. |
| 1 in 109% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Smoke on the deck at breakfast, Mt Hood invisible, headaches and coughing in the group, ash flecks on car hoods. | Treat it as a shelter-indoors day or leave early toward Portland or the coast; cancel all outdoor plans. |
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 Narrows Sep 15. The oldest is The Narrows, 29 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 (+13 on the likely worst day) across 65 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 9 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 sits on the west slope with Mt Hood between it and Grasshopper, the 94,000-acre fire 17 miles east, so that source needs an offshore reversal to reach Welches, and easterly flow runs only about 31% of days in this calendar window with no ensemble available to say whether this year leans above or below that. Terrain is not a blanket defense, though: The Narrows at 14 miles SSW and Austin at 18 miles S are in the Clackamas drainage on the house's own side of the crest, so light-wind nights can pool their smoke in the Sandy valley with no wind reversal needed at all. Against that, the dominant late-August pattern here is marine onshore flow, and the 2022-2025 archive shows zero days over 100 in this window including 2024, itself a record 2.08-million-acre Oregon year, which is strong evidence that statewide acreage does not translate into smoke at this specific address. The measured season anomaly of 1.07 says the air at this location has stayed close to normal, but it is computed over the 30 days before today, which is after the trip and after the fires were largely contained, so it is weak evidence about the trip window itself. I therefore push the 21 anchor up by 2.75x to a worst-day median of 58, reflecting a genuinely larger nearby source than the archive contains, while keeping the heavy end modest because the prevailing flow and the fires' containment trajectory both work against a multi-day episode.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 21 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 28 · 2024: 18 · 2023: 19 · 2022: 19.
We are forecasting a worst day of 55, 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 |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 90% 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 | 8 Clear | Good | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Newport coast | 20 / 17 | 17 Clear | Good | – steady | 101 mi · Austin |
| Astoria coast | 25 / 22 | 19 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 25 / 22 | 19 Clear | Good | – steady | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Manzanita coast | 26 / 24 | 20 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 28 / 24 | 20 Clear | — | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 29 / 26 | 20 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 40 / 26 | 21 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| McMinnville valley | 45 / 32 | 54 Hazy | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Portland valley | 46 / 37 | 62 Hazy | Good | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 49 / 36 | 33 Clear | — | – steady | 31 mi · Austin |
| Bend east of crest | 56 / 33 | 31 Clear | — | – steady | 35 mi · Crosswhite |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/14/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/14/26 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 2026-10-18 | 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 14 5:01 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 300 scored forecast-days, the air-quality model beat both simple baselines at 0 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 of August 28, 29 or 30, 2026 at the Welches house, expressed on the local monitor scale a phone app would display - not an hourly peak, not a 3-day average, and not the raw model scale, which this pack has already scaled down by its 0.355 factor.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.