The High Country Winter Forecast, Almanac Style

The left917 Winter Almanac. Prognostications, hunches and household hints for the High Country, December through February.

On Saturday, Oct. 17, a caterpillar will win a race in Banner Elk and be handed the job of telling the High Country what winter has in store. The festival has been doing this since 1978. The winning worm’s owner takes home $1,000. We love every minute of it. This is an almanac, not a weather page. For the real forecast, with numbers and reasoning, you want Ray Russell at RaysWeather.com. What follows is for fun and for the folklore.

So here is the almanac way, in short entries, each one labeled our own way.

OFFICIAL means a federal forecaster or a university climatologist put a number on it.

TRADITION means somebody's grandmother swore by it.

LOCAL means someone up here told us. We never promise. And in March we will grade ourselves in public.

Official word

OFFICIAL. You haven’t turned on a device and not heard this. We will say it anyway. The Climate Prediction Center put out an El Niño advisory on Sept. 10, and the language was not shy. A key stretch of the equatorial Pacific ran 1.8 degrees Celsius above normal in August. Forecasters now give better than a 90% chance of a very strong El Niño this fall and winter, and a 75% chance that the October through December reading tops every El Niño on record back to 1950.

What does a historic one mean for a mountain winter? That is a job for the pros. The one thing we can pass along is from the North Carolina State Climate Office at NC State University, which looked at the six strongest El Niño winters on record and found temperatures more than a degree warmer than usual and less snow across the Mountains and the Piedmont. That is history, not a forecast, and this one may have no history to lean on.

A mountain winter can be wet and warm and miserable, or wet and cold and gorgeous, and nobody gets to say which until it happens.

The real forecast

Ray Russell runs the most trusted weather page in the High Country. We are relying on tradition. He is a self-taught forecaster and retired App State computer science professor, he has kept RaysWeather.com going since 2000, and he has put out a Fearless Forecast every fall for more than 20 years. His full Fearless Forecast is a supporter feature, so go support the man. Russell is also the Democratic nominee for Watauga County Commissioner, District 2, on the Nov. 3 ballot against Republican Savva Kostis. We are linking his weather, not his campaign.

His 2026–27 forecast usually lands in mid-October. Read it before you buy a shovel.

What winter usually is

OFFICIAL. Boone’s normal winter snowfall is 25.6 inches, and Banner Elk, down the road, normally gets 31.4, according to Ray’s winter recap. The Old Farmer’s Almanac, working from NOAA’s 1991–2020 normals for the Boone 1 SE station, puts the average first frost at Oct. 8. That is Thursday.

Signs and sayings

TRADITION. The Woolly Worm Festival gets the big stage. Each of the winning worm’s 13 body segments stands for one week of winter, and the dark ones mean cold and snow. The festival’s own site says the Saturday champion earns the honor of predicting the High Country’s winter, plus $1,000. We could not find a scorecard on it, so nobody can say how often the worm has been right.

The rest of the folklore shelf is older and just as unaudited. Cut a persimmon seed open and read the kernel. A spoon means shovels, a knife means wind that cuts, a fork means a mild one. Hornet nests built high are said to promise deep snow. Busy squirrels are said to promise a long season. Nobody has ever sent us a peer-reviewed paper on any of it, and we like it better that way.

LOCAL. We are not the only ones keeping a jar. The Watauga Democrat reported in late September that Taz Kim of Deep Gap reads her winter in a jar of beans, one for each snow, small, medium or large, based on her August fog count. Her number for 2026–27 is 15 snows, four small, four medium and seven large. She also watches the trees. Nuts dropping early came ahead of a past winter that brought 18 to 24 inches, she says. Kim expects the El Niño to push her count higher. The State Climate Office’s history says the strongest El Niños tended to bring less snow to the mountains, so we will see who is right.

Last winter's report card

TRADITION v. THE REAL THING. Last October, a worm named Billy won, and the festival read his stripes as a cold, snowy start, a brief mild spell mid-season and a frosty finish, the Watauga Democrat reported. Ray put numbers on it. His free winter recap lists what he forecast and what fell. He said Boone would get 23 inches and Banner Elk 31. Boone got 25.0 inches, a hair under its 25.6 normal. Banner Elk got 40.9, about 130% of normal. Sugar Mountain landed within half an inch of his forecast.

The worm’s cold, snowy start checked out. Ray’s recap lists a blast in early November, with 8 to 10 inches or more at high elevations around Veterans Day, and a heavy Dec. 8 snow, 5 to 8 inches in Watauga and Ashe. We can’t grade the rest. The caterpillar held up. Ray held up better, because he gave numbers and then published the results.

So Banner Elk ran well above its snow average and Boone landed right at it. One caterpillar, two towns.

Anyone who lives here already knows why. Every holler and valley keeps its own weather, and a few miles of road can change your whole winter.

Days to watch

Thursday, Oct. 8. Boone’s average first frost, and the Climate Prediction Center’s next El Niño update.

Thursday, Oct. 15. The Climate Prediction Center’s next seasonal outlook, on its published release schedule.

Mid-October. Ray Russell’s Fearless Forecast for 2026–27 usually lands. Find it at RaysWeather.com.

Mid-November. Ski season. Sugar Mountain opened Nov. 11 last year, after the first measurable snow and a lot of snowmaking, the Avery Journal-Times reported.

Household hints

Stack a cord before the first cold snap and not after it. Drain the hose bibs. Look at your tires. Find the shovel and the ice melt before you need them. Put the scraper somewhere that isn't the trunk.

Drip the faucets on the coldest nights, and know where your water shutoff is. Keep a blanket, a shovel and a bag of kitty litter in the car for traction. Fill a few water jugs before a big storm, a lesson this region learned after Helene. Salt the steps before the ice, not after. Wipe the salt off the dog’s paws.

Check on the neighbor with no woodpile. Winter goes easier when we look out for each other.

Any winter punishes the people who wait.

Check back in March

The editors’ prediction, for what it’s worth, is not a forecast. We predict at least one morning you scrape the windshield and say it wasn’t this bad last year. We predict one warm afternoon in January that fools the daffodils. We will check in again in March, next to what actually fell, and we will tell you who was closer. The worm gets a say either way. So does Ray’s forecast, and it gets the last word.