High Country Dashboard

Drawn: Blue Ridge Parkway monthly recreation visits (NPS Stats). Blue Ridge Parkway, whole-parkway total (469 miles, NC + VA). 2 series in this group. Source: National Park Service, NPS Stats. Source: National Park Service, Visitor Use Statistics.

Blue Ridge Parkway recreation visits carry their full history from 1979 onward, read from the source series rather than the panel grid, which is trimmed to 2010-01.

Parkway visits are the whole 469-mile parkway across NC and VA — the calibration series for the High Country, not a measurement of it. The Watauga station count is the local one, and it is vehicles, not people.

Drawn: High Country listings-weighted average occupancy (9 markets, AirROI STR). High Country, NC — 9 STR markets: Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, Beech Mountain, Sugar Mountain, Seven Devils, Vilas, Valle Crucis, Deep Gap. 12 series in this group. Data source: AirROI.

Data source: AirROI — this attribution must render on every surface that shows any series in this file.

Market-level aggregates only; per-listing data is never ingested. The High Country aggregates are listings-weighted across the nine markets. History starts 2021-08 (the endpoint's trailing 60-month window).

Drawn: Watauga-area total ABC sales: sum of tracked boards' total sales (Boone + Blowing Rock, currently) for whichever reported that month. Boone & Blowing Rock ABC Boards, Watauga County, NC. 6 series in this group. Source: North Carolina ABC Commission. Source: North Carolina Department of Revenue.

Mixed-beverage sales are the bar and restaurant channel and track visitor traffic most directly; retail is the store channel.

The sales-and-use-tax distribution has real interior gaps where NCDOR did not publish the county's row — a missing month is a missing observation, never a zero.

The occupancy-tax series the Tourism Development Authority collects is not here; it is not public data and no agreement covers it yet.

Drawn: NAICS 72 (accommodation & food services) employment, private ownership. Watauga County, NC + Avery County, NC. 10 series in this group. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, QCEW. Source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

QCEW publishes quarterly; employment is spread across the quarter's three months and the average weekly wage is the one quarterly figure repeated across them. No county data before 2014 Q1, and BLS revises.

tourism_emp is NAICS 72 (accommodation & food services); rec_emp is NAICS 71 (arts, entertainment & recreation) — added because the region's ski resorts classify under NAICS 71, not 72. leisure_hosp_emp is their sum, written only for months where both are reported; NAICS 71 is more prone to BLS disclosure suppression than 72, and a suppressed month omits rec_emp and leisure_hosp_emp rather than zeroing them.

QCEW counts employment by place of WORK, not residence. Beech Mountain Resort and Sugar Mountain Resort (and Grandfather Mountain) sit in Avery County, not Watauga, so Watauga-only NAICS 71 misses two of the region's three ski mountains. avery_tourism_emp / avery_rec_emp are Avery's NAICS 72/71 employment (employment only — no Avery wage figure is carried); hc_leisure_hosp_emp sums all four (Watauga + Avery, both sectors), written only for months where all four are reported. Avery is a smaller county and either of its sectors can be disclosure-suppressed independently of Watauga's.

QCEW's monthly employment level is the count in the pay period including the 12th — a resort's mid-to-late-December ski-season hiring that lands after the 12th surfaces in January's count, not December's.

Unemployment is BLS LAUS, not seasonally adjusted — the tourism seasonality this panel tracks is left in.

watauga_employed (also LAUS, monthly) is the employment-level sibling of the unemployment rate — no multi-month publication lag the way QCEW has, so it is the freshest total-employment read in this file, at the cost of carrying no industry breakdown.

Drawn: Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), Watauga County, NC — all-homes, mid tier (0.33-0.67), smoothed, seasonally adjusted. Watauga County, NC. 4 series in this group. Data: Zillow Research (zillow.com/research/data). Data: Redfin, redfin.com/news/data-center.

Data: Zillow Research (ZHVI) and Redfin (sales, inventory) — both attributions must render on every surface that shows these series.

ZHVI is smoothed and seasonally adjusted: directional housing context, not a transaction count. Redfin's trailing one to two months are provisional and get revised as sales record.

Drawn: Weekly retail gasoline price, Lower Atlantic (PADD 1C), regular grade, all formulations — monthly mean of weekly EIA survey. Lower Atlantic (PADD 1C): FL, GA, NC, SC, VA, WV. 3 series in this group. Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration. Source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Directional context, not local measurement. These are national and regional series describing the environment High Country visitors travel from; none of them measures the High Country.

Drawn: Temperature anomaly vs. the 1991-2020 same-calendar-month normal. Boone, NC -- station USC00310982 (BOONE 1 SE, NC US, 36.21395, -81.64563). 4 series in this group. Source: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, GHCN-Daily.

NOAA GHCN-Daily station observations (Boone 1 SE, station USC00310982), aggregated monthly. US-government public domain — this file exists because David ratified the NOAA source on 2026-08-13; the panel never exported its earlier non-commercial weather feed.

The temperature anomaly is against the station's own 1991-2020 same-calendar-month normal; a snow day is >= 1.0 cm of snowfall. A station misses days, so each element of a month is reported only when at most five days are missing for it.

Anomalies and small counts should be compared as level differences, not percentages.

Drawn: Monthly average daily traffic, continuous count station 0R9401. Watauga County, NC — continuous count station 0R9401. Source: NCDOT Traffic Survey Group (via NCDOT ArcGIS AADT publications and FHWA TMAS).

One continuous count station (0R9401, US 221/321 on the Boone-Blowing Rock leg), established 2015 — no earlier history exists for the county. Historical months via FHWA TMAS; current-year months via NCDOT's TCDS portal (same measurement, matches TMAS exactly on overlap), so this series runs within a month of the present.

Drawn: Proprietary corridor speed sampling — US-321 Blowing Rock Rd (Boone bypass) (mean speed ratio). Six corridor segments, Watauga County, NC: bypass-321 (US-321 Blowing Rock Rd (Boone bypass)); king-st (King St / US-421 downtown Boone); nc105-foscoe (NC-105 South at Foscoe (ski approach)); nc105-split (NC-105 at the US-321 split); us321-blowing-rock (US-321 Valley Blvd, Blowing Rock); us421-deep-gap (US-421 Doc & Merle Watson Hwy, Deep Gap). 6 series in this group. Proprietary corridor speed sampling (six Watauga corridors, via DavesSweater).

Proprietary corridor speed sampling. The ratio is mean current speed over free-flow speed: 1.0 is free flow, lower is more congested.

Live layer only — sampling started 2026-07-25, so every month so far is partial and none of these should be read as a full-month average.

Attributable corridor claims ride on NPS and NCDOT instead; see the traffic_madt file.