High Country Festivals

COVID-19 NOTICE: Due to the biggest epidemic known to mankind, this page now serves as a remembrance of The 2020 Festival Season That Could Have Been, but wasn't. I finished this within hours of Rail Jam being postponed. Seeing that MerleFest lineup cancellation was sickening. But- the page templates are here, are open for anybody to use, and will be updated in time for Festival Season 2021. Hang in there friends, world willing we'll see it.

March Festivals: Livestarr Indie Music Festival |
May Festivals:
June Festivals:
August Festivals:
September Festivals: Mountain Heritage Festival |
November Festivals: Virginia Creeper Fest |


The constant struggle of living in Boone is finding a living wage. We have a strange, small town economy, with a student body larger than the permanent population.

This means both that students occupy most of the entry-level jobs, and that few skilled jobs exist for students to move into once they graduate.

This makes it harder for locals to find jobs paying above a "student wage", and means most students leave immediately after graduation instead of creating new businesses and jobs within the community that educated them.

Economic success is possible in Boone, it just takes creativity to find a niche. We have an amazing community of crafters, artists, and small business owners who have settled in and found their groove.

The high number of festivals with vending opportunities in Western North Carolina also provide a path for those willing to invest in their creative businesses to make income doing the thing they love.

This section of the Boonieverse is a toolbox to make it easier for entrepreneurs to find local vending opportunities and develop regular revenue from their ideas.

Each festival page is divided into two parts. Up top is current information for each opportunity, including vendor forms, contact information, vendor costs, and more.

Down below are community reports from past festival attendees and vendors. By completing the five-question survey on each page, your responses will be automatically tallied into the graphs on each page.

This information is included to give a feel for how much other vendors are making and festival attendees are spending to help you budget and plan for each festival.

The links below are a worksheet tool for festival vendors to plan out their costs and income per each event and throughout the season. Both the excel and pdf form have handy formulas built in to do all of the math for you, and a checklist to plan your basic costs of setting up to vend.

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This list is also a tool for organizers- as you can see, some months are more full than others, showing where there is potential to create new festivals and provide even more opportunities for local vendors, musicians, and festivalgoers to connect.

And as with everything on the Boonieverse- this is an ongoing resource to be added to over time. You can contribute yourself!

Start by taking the survey for any festival you've attended in the past, and create your Nom de Boone to add and edit pages.

If you are a festival organizer, email XXX@XXX to claim your festival page and help keep it updated.

Thanks all! Hope this helps more people live the good life and make Boone the home base for your creative business idea.

Viva Watauga!

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