Crater Lake National Park wildfire smoke forecast
The map above shows NOAA HRRR-Smoke near-surface PM2.5 for the next 48 hours, updated hourly, with active fires from NIFC and live AQI from EPA AirNow monitors. It opens over Crater Lake National Park.
The caldera rim sits near 7,100 feet with the lake surface about 900 feet below it, forming a bowl roughly five miles across. Smoke that reaches the park settles into that bowl and can hide the lake completely from a rim viewpoint while the surrounding forest looks merely hazy. The rim road runs high enough that it is sometimes above the layer and sometimes in it.
Where the smoke comes from
Southern Oregon and northern California are among the most fire-active regions in the West in late summer, and the park sits in the middle of them. The Umpqua, Rogue River-Siskiyou, and Fremont-Winema national forests all surround it, and fires inside the park boundary are not unusual.
How long it lasts
The caldera holds what settles into it, so the lake view is the last thing to come back. Regional episodes here are driven by the density of nearby fires rather than by any single one, which means clearing usually waits for a genuine change in the weather pattern rather than for one incident to be contained.
Past smoke events
The 2017 season, with the Spruce Lake and Blanket Creek fires burning in and near the park, brought closures and stretches when the lake was invisible from the rim. The 2021 and 2020 seasons produced comparable regional smoke across southern Oregon.
Trails and viewpoints
Rim Drive, Watchman Peak, and Garfield Peak exist for the view, which is exactly what a caldera smoke layer removes. Cleetwood Cove descends to the water and into the densest part of the layer. For a trip planned around seeing the lake, the 48-hour outlook is worth more than the current reading.
Reading the map
Use the layer toggle to compare NOAA HRRR-Smoke with the ECCC FireWork model. When the two disagree, treat the higher reading as the cautious call.
Near-surface is the product that maps to what you breathe and to AQI, not the high-altitude column that only tints the sunset. A sky that looks bad and a monitor that reads fine are usually both correct, and they are describing different layers of air.