Reports and Tools
Data deep-dives with charts and receipts, and the free tools built on them.
Grandfather Mountain Highland Games 2026: Schedule, Parking & Day Planner
July 6, 2026
A free, genuinely useful planner for the 70th Games (July 9–12): Filter the schedule, then get it back the way you need it. A downloadable, printable per-day itinerary, a field map with your stops pinned, arrive-by and between-event walk times, the right lot and shuttle fare, a live mountain forecast with packing list, and a calendar export. Everything the official schedule leaves you to figure out.
Jump straight into the planner
Pick a day, or start with the marquee events.
Which day are you going?
2026 Fourth of July fireworks in Boone and the High Country: Exact times, computed
July 2, 2026
What you get: Fireworks-specific weather for each show (clouds, wind, fog), start times projected from dusk math and mountain terrain, verified event details, and a sightline check from any address.
Tools and trackers
Pages that keep updating, rather than a report published once.
Road conditions in the High Country, graded daily
A daily road-risk forecast for the High Country, from clear to hazardous, graded against what NCDOT and the Parkway actually reported. The rubric is on the page, so you can see why a day was called.
The monthly Ray's Weather Report Card
One page per graded month, showing how each Boone forecaster did against verified actuals and how the running totals moved.
Try the fireworks report
Where should you watch from?
Type an address (or share your location) and the report computes the terrain between you and every show, showing which fireworks you can actually see from there, paired with that night's sky forecast.