Banner Elk

Mountains today, pretty darn chilly.

44 in Banner Elk.

Tomorrow's a better day if you wanna get up there and really enjoy some of the autumn colors.

So the rain continues for a few more hours.

Where are you going?

Uh, like Banner Elk, Boone area.

Yeah, same.

That's great.

You go, you go to grandfather, don't you?

We're going to Banner Elk.

Yeah.

Hell yeah, dog.

Gonna be pretty nice overall.

Up in the mountains this weekend, Banner Elk might get a little wintry mix there, but otherwise should be just fine, but really cool.

42 in Banner Elk for the high temperature.

Uh, pretty darn chilly.

60s tonight, clear skies.

YepUh, you know, striking the, the high country of North Carolina.

And, um, and, and I do quite a bit of traveling up to the, the Banner Elk, Boone, Blowing Rock area and Newland and, um, Elk Park and, uh, for work.

And you can still see, um, a lot of the, the natural devastation that happened.

They've rebuilt really, really well very, very quickly.

A few numbers for you because, you know, if you forgot, we're a numbers podcast.

Last year, the third weekend of October brought us Valley Country Fair, the Woolly Worm Festival up in Banner Elk, and App State's Homecoming football game.

Now, according to our Placer AI data, downtown Boone saw nearly 94,000 non-resident visits that weekend.

Again, the football game had something to do with that.

Banner Elk, nearly 47,000 in the backyard of the Woolly Worm Festival.

Overall, Watauga County saw 125,000 visitors from October 17th through the 19th of 2025.

So these festivals are not just cute pop-up events.

But it's such an iconic weekend in the high country because you have the Valley Country Fair.

And we are taking a look at the fall foliage here in western North Carolina.

You can see the yellow and the orange leaves on the campus of Lee's McRae College in Banner Elk.

According to North Carolina Fall Foliage Map, the Banner Elk area is seeing high color right now.

We're seeing leaves beginning to change around here.

But we are far away from peak color at this point.

And by the time we get to next weekend, we could be talking about some more rain around here.

Boone and Banner Elk cloudy, some showers, even thunderstorms in the southern mountains.

The beaches are unsettled.

We got rain going on this morning and still a risk of that as we go into the afternoon.

And we know that people who used to live here, they can't be found.

We knew that there was a morgue up in Banner Elk.

for some reason that never filled up, but I heard filled up.

There was the morgue truck behind the Asheville Memorial Hospital that was filled up, but somehow was not filled up.

Yeah.

I mean, we heard these things, but again, to get from Banner Elk to here along 105, which kind of washed because the Watauga River runs through there, we saw a lot of helicopters going up there.

And once, I mean, people were telling me about Facebook posts of people being stranded.

It's just, we, we were kind of in the dark about a lot of this stuff.

Yeah, we say it all the time on this podcast, how convenient the Charlotte and Lake Norman metro area is to the mountains.

Half of my business is in the high country and Banner Elk and Boone and Blowing Rock.

And it's a pretty easy commute.

Very justifiable if you want to just do a night or two.

Drive to Asheville or Banner Elk.

It's just a couple hours away.

And then the coast, you can get to the beach in three and a half hours, which is great.

So if people look at my history of how I've invested into short-term rental since 2015, it's always a secondary and tertiary markets.

So instead of going into the Smoky Mountains, I went to Banner Elk, North Carolina.

Instead of going to Bozeman or Big Sky, Montana, I went to Whitefish, Montana.

Instead of Scottsdale, I went to Cave Creek.