This is a community culture broadcast for Watauga, Ashe, and Avery Counties, inspired by the spirit of pirate radio and alt-weeklies of the past. We don't want to be on Instagram, but we all deserve to know what's happening in our own town. So we broadcast from here.
The news, events, alerts, and small reports about what's actually happening in the High Country. We don't show up in the FCC database. That's the point.
It's a super bleak time for traditional media. As a society we've gotten used to the dopamine hits we get from "breaking news" on social media.
And for what it's worth, this isn't about being anti-social media. It's about being pro-curation. It's about thoughtfully looking for the weird, the unique, the heartwarming cultural stories that make The High Country what it is.
And that's found in dive bars, hollers, barns, startups, struggling restaurants and artisan businesses. It's found in civic meetings and chamber of commerce events right here in The High Country. Because there's nothing else like left917 up here.
Got a tip, a correction, or want your venue on the air? Email studio@left917.net or use the contact form. Sitting on a story worth telling? Pitch us →
91.7 isn't licensed to anyone in Boone. It sits in the gap between WASU at 90.5 and the next station up the dial, in the 88-to-92 MHz educational band where college stations, community stations, and pirate broadcasters have been quietly making things interesting for sixty years.
The Replacements wrote a song about chasing those low-band signals on the highway in 1985. They called it "Left of the Dial." We named the URL after the band.
You won't find a like button here. No comment section, no follower count, no little number telling you how you're supposed to feel about your own town. That machinery exists to keep you scrolling and performing for strangers. We're not interested.
Every button on left917 points you at engaging with real humans you know. Sharing beats posting.
left917 is growing into a hyper-local alt-weekly. We're starting to report our own stories on High Country news, food, arts, and culture, and we'll keep leaning that way as we build. We're looking for the untold stories, the weird, unique, inspirational and emotional stories of the real humans who make up the fabric of The High Country.
While we grow, we also aggregate. We pull headlines, events, and alerts from the outlets below, write a one-line summary, and link straight back to the original. When the reporting is someone else's, we flag it and send you to them. Go read them, and support the ones you can. We don't want to compete with our news partners. We are telling different and equally valuable stories.
867 items on air · updated Aug 5, 2:07 AM ET · refreshes every 15 min. The number by each source is what it's carrying now. A zero usually means it's quiet (no active alerts, an empty calendar), not broken.
