Ray's Weather Has 66 Locations and 3 Forecasts

Ray’s Weather advertises a local forecast for more than 70 High Country locations. We wanted to know what “local” means when one small shop covers that much ground, so we read all of them on the same day and counted. What we found is easy to check yourself, and it is the reason we built our town pages the way we did.

The claim on the tin

Ray’s Weather sells itself on hyper-local coverage, “a 7-day forecast for 70+ locations” across the High Country. Boone, Beech Mountain, Mt. Mitchell, Linville, Sparta, West Jefferson, and dozens more, each with its own page, its own forecast, its own write-up.

That’s the pitch. We wanted to see what “its own forecast” actually means, so on July 7 we pulled the written forecast for all 66 locations at the same moment.

Sixty-six locations. Three forecasts.

Not 66 forecasts. Not 50. Three.

Every one of the 66 locations was served one of exactly three written narratives, one for the mountains, one for the foothills, one for the Asheville basin, each signed by the same author and stamped across dozens of “individual” town pages.

Here’s the part that’s hard to unsee. In the mountain group, Mt. Mitchell, at 6,684 feet the highest peak east of the Mississippi, got the exact same written forecast as downtown Boone, 3,400 feet lower. Word for word. Beech Mountain, Sugar Mountain, and Linville Ridge got it too. A 4,000-foot spread of elevation, one paragraph of weather.

We’re not paraphrasing or characterizing. The text is byte-for-byte identical. We checked it programmatically, then checked it again to be sure it wasn’t a fluke.

What’s actually different between towns

The numbers. Ray’s does attach a genuine per-town high and low. Mt. Mitchell ran 26 degrees colder than Hickory the day we looked, which is real and correct, so the data underneath is per-location. It’s the forecast, the part a person writes and the part you actually read, that’s one-size-fits-a-region.

Which is a defensible way to run a weather service. Writing 66 genuinely distinct daily narratives is a lot of work for a seven-person shop. But it’s worth knowing that the “local forecast” for your town is, in the part that’s written in English, the same forecast they gave a mountaintop an hour away.

Check it yourself

This isn’t our data or our interpretation. It’s his, served publicly, and you can reproduce it in a minute. Open two town pages on RaysWeather.Com that sit far apart in elevation, like Boone and Beech Mountain, and read the written forecast paragraph on each, side by side. The high and low will differ. The prose won’t. Do it again with a mountain town and a foothills town and you’ll land in a different one of the three narratives. That’s the whole finding: numbers per town, paragraphs per region.

What we do instead

Dave’s Sweater tracks 17 High Country towns plus Boone, and each one is genuinely its own. Every town’s forecast is computed at that town’s verified coordinates by eight independent sources, and every town is graded daily against its own recorded conditions on the same 100-point rubric. There is no regional write-up to stamp, because nobody here writes one. The data is the forecast.

We’d rather cover fewer places honestly than list more than we actually forecast. Compare Beech Mountain, at 5,436 feet, with North Wilkesboro, at 1,001 feet. Different towns, different forecasts, and both graded against what actually happened, which you can check on each town’s own scoreboard.

One more thing we won’t do: fake his coverage either. Where Ray’s genuinely has a station in a town, his numbers appear in that town’s tracker to be graded like everyone else’s. Where he doesn’t, in Seven Devils, Sugar Grove, and Wilkesboro, his column sits empty rather than borrowing the next town over. The blank is the honest answer, for him and for us.

Frequently asked questions

Don’t you generate your forecasts too?

We do, and that’s the point rather than the dodge. The criticism here isn’t “you didn’t hand-write it.” It’s “you published one forecast as sixty-six.” Our forecast for each town is computed from that town’s own coordinates, it differs town to town, and every town is graded daily against what actually happened. A mountaintop and a valley never get the same numbers from us, and if they did, the scoreboard would catch it.

Is Ray’s Weather data wrong?

No. His per-town highs and lows are real and genuinely per-location, because Mt. Mitchell reads far colder than Hickory when it is. The finding is narrower and checkable: the written narrative, the part a person reads, repeats across whole regions.

How did you check this?

On July 7, 2026 we read the published written forecast for all 66 of Ray’s Weather locations at the same moment and compared the text. Sixty-six pages resolved to three distinct narratives. The counts can drift day to day, but the pattern holds: a handful of regional write-ups spread across every town. Every number here is his, served publicly, and reproducible by anyone.

Dave’s Sweater is Boone’s #2 weather resource and is not affiliated with Ray’s Weather. The forecast counts above were read from RaysWeather.Com’s own public data on July 7, 2026, and are reproducible by anyone. Numbers are facts; the writing is his.