BOONE, N.C. — On a rainy Saturday in North Carolina’s High County, tourists and students lined the sidewalks along King Street, the main drag through Boone. Despite the coronavirus pandemic, people have been flocking to the mountains of western North Carolina as the weather cools and the leaves change.
“This week I had a scare,” Appalachian State University freshman Laurin Fogle said. “Two people on my floor tested positive and one of them was a friend of mine who I had been hanging out with.”
“This week I got tested and I had been staying in my dorm until I got my results back,” she said.
Fogle was working in her uncle’s small King Street store over the weekend. Mid-October is the season for tourists to head to the mountains as the trees hit their fall peak with bright hues of red, orange and yellow covering the slopes.
Tourists perused the clothes and jewelry along the store’s single aisle off the street. Social distancing was impossible as shoppers squeezed past each other between tightly packed racks of clothes, purses made from help and display cases with silver jewelry.
Everyone wore masks of varying shapes, sizes and designs as they came into the store. Fogle told customers about their special 20% off purses as they walked in past the register.
Appalachian State is one of the 16 universities in the North Carolina system, and it opened as scheduled with a combination of in-person and virtual classes.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill made national headlines when it closed just ten days after starting classes this semester as cases of COVID-19 popped up in clusters around campus.
N.C. State University in Raleigh also shut down its dorms after the virus started spreading through residence halls, off-campus housing and sororities and fraternities.
As of Sunday, Appalachian State reported 132 students and one employee in isolation with COVID-19. The number of active cases at the university have dropped from a peak of 225 on Oct. 3.
A 19-year-old sophomore at Appalachian State died from complications related to COVID-19 last month.
The university has had 852 students and 77 employees and subcontractors test positive for the virus since late March. Most of those cases have been reported since the school brought students back on campus, according to the school’s virus dashboard.
Boone’s Watauga County has reported 1,561 cases of COVID-19 since testing began there, according to App Health, the public health department that serves Watauga, Ashe and Allegheny counties.
The department reports 228 active cases in Watauga County and 14 deaths.
There are 18 active coronavirus clusters on campus, according to the university, including 78 people associated with the football team and 12 on the wrestling team. Students in six residence halls and one sorority have tested positive in the past week.
Appalachian State has not had any cases traced to transmission in a classroom, according to an update from the university posted Sunday.
Despite the rain and the pandemic, Boone was bustling over the weekend. Many restaurants, still serving at 50% capacity because of coronavirus restrictions, had waiting lists for diners along the main drag near the university.
Fall tourists, called “leaf peepers” (sometimes derogatively) by many locals, wandered the shops in downtown Boone. Mask General Store, a shopping landmark in the center of town, had a line to get in so the store would not go over the cap set by the state’s emergency virus order.
Some people wore masks as they browsed along the sidewalks, and every store required face masks inside.
Parish, owner of Highway Robbery boutique on King Street, had a steady stream of customers Saturday.
He said a number of businesses around Boone have struggled during the pandemic.
“We’ve had a lot of mom-and-pop restaurants go out of business,” he said, because they couldn’t survive with the lower capacity.
“I’m taking a chance every day being here at work, but what am I going to do?” Parish said. He said he wasn’t able to get federal assistance during the shutdown because he doesn’t have enough employees to qualify.
Parish said the tourism season has been good so far, starting over the summer. But he’s been seeing more visitors from places like Raleigh, Durham and Winston-Salem than in normal years, when many of the tourists come from out of state.
“Tourism has been really good this summer, but it’s the opposite of normal,” he said.
Michelle Ligon, director of public relations for the Explore Boone, the city’s visitor’s bureau, is still seeing a lot of tourists come from out of state.
The biggest question for Ligon this year has been about what’s open. She’s also getting a lot of questions about the rules during the pandemic, as tourists coming from out of state want to know about mask mandates and social distancing requirements in North Carolina.
Ligon, who has worked at the visitor’s center for almost 20 years, said she thinks businesses in the community have been responsible about reopening during the pandemic. “I’ve been proud about that,” she said.
She said she’s seen several restaurants close temporarily after an employee tested positive so they can clean the restaurant and make sure no other employees are sick.
Ligon says there's still time left for tourists to come enjoy the fall season, and they're definitely coming as expected, despite the mask orders and social distancing.
For Laurin Fogle, the Appalachian State freshman, she's definitely not getting the normal college experience in Boone. “There’s not much you can get away with anymore. No partying is really going on and stuff like that," she said.
Most people - locals, students and tourists - seem to be doing their part to slow the spread of the virus.
“We’re obviously kids still, and so we obviously make stupid decisions and don’t wear our masks all the time that we’re hanging out. We do for the most part wear our masks out in public," Fogle said. “I would say for the most part we’re doing our job.”