Places to stay near attractions in Boone / Blowing Rock

Boone, North Carolina is the seat of Watauga County and the largest town in the North Carolina High Country, sitting at 3,333 feet in a bowl of 4,000- to 5,000-foot peaks. Home to Appalachian State University since 1899, Boone combines a college-town restaurant and music scene along King Street with easy access to the Blue Ridge Parkway, Grandfather Mountain, and the Boone Fork and New River drainages.

Boone is named for Daniel Boone, who camped here in the 1760s while hunting the Watauga watershed, and the Horn in the West outdoor drama has told his story every summer since 1952. The Blue Ridge Parkway runs through the north side of town, and it is 15 minutes to Blowing Rock, one of the most-photographed cliff overlooks in the Southeast (a 4,000-foot outcrop where a persistent updraft famously blows light objects back upward), and to Moses H. Cone Memorial Park and Bass Lake.

Winter brings Appalachian Ski Mountain and Sugar Mountain within 20 minutes, and summer opens up the New River — one of the oldest rivers in the world — for tubing, canoeing, and camping. Fall pushes the Parkway between Boone and Linville Falls into some of the best foliage driving on the East Coast.