First, a caveat you should know up front: these trip dates are already 43 days in the past, and the fire sizes and containment numbers in this evidence pack were measured in mid-September, after the trip ended, so this is a reconstruction rather than a live forecast. For the weekend itself, the honest read is that four separate fires were burning within 20 miles of the house during late August, and two of them sat on the same side of the Cascade crest as the house, so Mt Hood was not protecting you from everything.
The usual late-August air at this address is clean and the prevailing wind comes off the ocean, so the likeliest weekend was mildly hazy and perfectly usable, but a stretch of east or south wind over a fire that size would have given you one day in the 100-150 range where kids, older guests, and anyone with asthma 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 Mt Hood sharp and visible from the Highway 26 pullouts, blue sky, maybe a faint brown line low on the eastern horizon in the afternoon; nobody notices the air. | nothing |
| 3 in 1032% | Hazy but fine AQI 50-100 Milky white sky, the mountain's outline soft, a faint campfire smell in the morning before the valley flushes out; eyes a bit scratchy on a long hike but everything on the itinerary still happens. | Move the hardest hike to the morning, keep windows shut overnight, and let anyone with asthma sit out the uphill. |
| 2 in 1017% | One smoky day AQI 100-150 Orange-tinted sun, ridges across the valley invisible, visible smoke layer in the trees, clear smell indoors; one day where the group stays in and plays cards. | Run a box-fan filter in the main room, drop outdoor plans for that day, drive down to Sandy or Portland if anyone is struggling. |
| 1 in 1010% | Real smoke episode AQI 150+ Daylight dim and brown by mid-morning, no visibility past a few hundred yards, headaches and sore throats indoors, deputies and fire trucks moving on US-26. | Leave early, west and downhill; check the Clackamas County evacuation map before you pack the cars. |
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, 25 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 61 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 here is transport, and the pack shows it running in more than one direction: Grasshopper at 93,971 acres is 17.4 miles due east, which is the one bearing where Mt Hood sits in the path, but Austin (12,888 acres, 18.3 miles south), Kleinsmith (12.9 miles west) and The Narrows (13.9 miles SSW) are all on the house's own side of the crest with no barrier at all, so the common claim that terrain protects Welches is only partly true. Against that, the base state is strongly favorable: this is a west-slope Cascade valley where onshore marine flow dominates roughly two days in three, the 28 sampled days in this calendar window across 2022-2025 never once exceeded AQI 100 and topped out at 22, and every fire in the pack that has a containment figure was at 95-98% by mid-September, meaning late August was their active phase but not an extended one. The upper tail is nevertheless under-sampled rather than measured — the archive starts in 2022 and has never seen a 2020-type year — and 2026 brought record state acreage, 96% drought, record-low snowpack and PL 5 since July 18, which is why I put eight points of probability above 150 instead of the roughly zero the raw base rate would imply. I did not stack a generic bad-year multiplier on the season-anomaly ratio, because the pack tells me not to and because that ratio's window (Sep 10 - Oct 10) sits entirely after the trip; I departed upward from it instead on the specific, local grounds that four fires were within 20 miles and two needed no crest crossing.
A normal late August here is Clear - median AQI 12 across the last 4 years. On these exact dates: 2025: 16 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 11.
We are forecasting a worst day of 55, 43 points above that base rate. That departure rests entirely on the reasoning above; judge it for yourself.
| 12.9 mi | Kleinsmith W | size not yet reported |
| 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 |
| 32.4 mi | Triple Butte RX SSE | size not yet reported |
| 37.0 mi | High Lava N | 2,899 acres · 95% contained |
The biggest hole in this forecast: 2 of the nearby fires (Kleinsmith, Triple Butte 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 | 5.2 mi |
| Brightwood | 5.2 mi |
| Welches | 11.3 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 |
| Welches / Mt Hood booked | 20 / 15 | 8 Clear | Good | – steady | 14 mi · The Narrows |
| Newport coast | 20 / 17 | 15 Clear | Good | – steady | 101 mi · Austin |
| Astoria coast | 25 / 22 | 11 Clear | Good | – steady | 84 mi · High Lava |
| Long Beach, WA coast | 25 / 22 | 11 Clear | Good | ▲ worsening | 97 mi · High Lava |
| Manzanita coast | 26 / 24 | 16 Clear | — | – steady | 87 mi · High Lava |
| Cannon Beach coast | 28 / 24 | 16 Clear | — | – steady | 88 mi · High Lava |
| Pacific City coast | 29 / 26 | 16 Clear | — | – steady | 91 mi · The Narrows |
| Hood River east of crest | 40 / 26 | 16 Clear | Good | – steady | 21 mi · Grasshopper |
| McMinnville valley | 45 / 32 | 34 Clear | Good | – steady | 54 mi · The Narrows |
| Portland valley | 46 / 37 | 26 Clear | Good | – steady | 36 mi · High Lava |
| Silver Falls valley | 49 / 36 | 18 Clear | — | ▲ worsening | 31 mi · Austin |
| Bend east of crest | 56 / 33 | 14 Clear | — | – steady | 35 mi · Crosswhite |
| Field | Period it covers | What it is |
| Air right now | 10/10/26 4:00 PDT | Nearest EPA/AirNow ground monitor to each place, within 45 miles airnow.gov |
| Official forecast | issued 10/10/26 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 2026-10-14 | 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 10 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 22, 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 280 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 quantity, on the local monitor scale that a phone app displays — already calibrated, with no further bias correction from me. For each calendar day I take the highest 24-hour AQI value touching that day at the house (45.3201, -121.9561, Mt Hood Village / Welches), and the headline number is the single worst of the three days Aug 28, 29 and 30, 2026 — not their average.”
Updated daily at 5am. A convenience, not an authority -
if officials issue an evacuation order, follow it.