First, a flag you need before anything else: the dates you gave me are August 28-30, and today is October 19, so this weekend has already happened — nothing below is a live decision, and the fire and containment numbers in my evidence were measured in mid-September, after your trip ended. Treating it as a forecast made from the available data, the most likely outcome at the Welches house was visible haze and a grey-white sky rather than a stay-indoors smoke event, because the two big fires near you sit on the far side of Mt Hood and late-August flow on the west slope is usually onshore off the ocean.
The real risk was a night or two of east downslope wind pulling smoke down the Sandy valley, which I put at roughly a one-in-three to one-in-four chance of pushing a single day into unhealthy-for-sensitive-groups territory.
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 1021% | Clear weekend AQI 0-50 Blue sky, Mt Hood sharp from the Zigzag, you can smell fir instead of ash; maybe a faint campfire note at dawn that burns off by nine. | nothing |
| 4 in 1041% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the mountain soft-edged or invisible, orange sun at sunset, faint smoke smell in the mornings. Kids and hikers are fine; anyone with asthma notices it on a climb. | Light overnight drainage flow off the east side settles smoke in the valley until the afternoon marine push clears it. |
| 2 in 1024% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Ridgelines across the highway are grey silhouettes, visibility a couple of miles, eyes and throat scratchy outdoors, the house smells like smoke if windows were open overnight. | A ridge builds inland and the gradient reverses for 12-36 hours; east downslope wind carries Grasshopper's interior smoke over the pass and it pools under a morning inversion. |
| 1 in 1015% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Brown-orange daylight, sun a red disc at noon, you can't see the far side of the golf course; everyone stays inside with the windows shut and it is unpleasant even indoors without a filter. | Sustained offshore flow for multiple days, or a new ignition on the west slope inside 20 miles growing before initial attack can hold it, or Austin/Bench making a wind-driven run north. |
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, 34 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 (+43 on the likely worst day) across 70 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 mechanism that matters is transport direction, not fire size. The largest nearby fire, Grasshopper at about 94,000 acres, bears due east at 17 miles with Mt Hood's 11,250-foot massif between it and the house, and late-August flow on the west slope is predominantly onshore westerly off the Pacific, which carries that smoke away from Welches; the offshore climatology for this calendar window is only about 31% of days, and the ensemble field that would have told me whether this year departed from that is null, so I cannot claim a negative departure and have to price the base rate. What keeps my number above the 4-year median of 63 is that the fires on the house's own side of the crest are real — Austin at nearly 13,000 acres 18 miles south, Bench at 67,000 acres southeast, The Narrows 14 miles southwest — and under any pre-frontal southerly component those are upwind, in a year with record statewide acreage, 96% drought coverage, the lowest April snowpack on record, and PL 5 since mid-July, meaning a new west-slope ignition inside 20 miles would have faced thin initial attack. What keeps my number well below the climatological p90 of 234 is that the pack's own concrete record for this window shows 3.6% of days over 100, zero days over 150, and a worst day of 117 across four years — which is internally inconsistent with that p90 and suggests the CAMS tail is drawn from a wider sample than this location.
A normal late August here is Hazy - median AQI 63 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 82 · 2024: 53 · 2023: 56 · 2022: 57.
We are forecasting a worst day of 85, 22 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 |
| 15.9 mi | Latigo Lane WNW | size not yet reported |
| 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 · 100% contained |
| 44.1 mi | Muddy Run RX SSE | size not yet reported |
| 45.5 mi | Bench SSE | 67,071 acres · 90% contained |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 2 of the nearby fires (Latigo Lane, Muddy Run RX) 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 | 2.7 mi |
| Brightwood | 7.1 mi |
| Welches | 13.6 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 | 19 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 101 mi · Austin |
| Astoria coast | 21 / 18 | 15 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 22 / 19 | 15 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 23 / 17 | 31 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Manzanita coast | 29 / 27 | 18 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 31 / 27 | 18 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 31 / 28 | 18 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 42 / 28 | 21 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| Portland valley | 47 / 38 | 60 Hazy | Good | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 53 / 39 | 38 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 31 mi · Austin |
| McMinnville valley | 55 / 38 | 33 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Bend east of crest | 58 / 34 | 36 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 36 mi · Bench |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/19/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/19/26 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 2026-10-23 | 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, 2026-10-01 to 2026-10-14 | Median of daily model-vs-monitor ratios — the bias differs by place, from 0.37 on the coast to 0.768 inland AirNow daily archive |
| Nearest fire | queried Oct 19 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 (Estacada, 18.3 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 117, 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 325 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 EPA AQI for PM2.5 as a 24-hour average quantity: for each of August 28, 29 and 30, 2026, the highest 24-hour-average AQI value touching that calendar day at the house in Mt Hood Village / Welches, Oregon (45.3201, -121.9561), expressed on the local monitor scale that a phone app such as AirNow would display — already bias-calibrated, with no further correction applied by me — and the headline number is the single worst of those three days, not their average.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.