This Friday, the parking lot at Beech Mountain Resort will start filling before mid-morning, the shuttle line will wrap past the base building, and out-of-state plates will outnumber local ones for the first time since the summer bike park crowds thinned out. Autumn at Oz opens its first weekend on September 11, and for a lot of longtime residents, the instinct is to treat it as a rerun. Same yellow brick road, same characters, same three weekends in September, same crowd.
That instinct is only half right. The festival reopening this month is not quite the one that went dark in 2025, and the difference matters less for what's on the mountain and more for how the crowd gets there, how fast tickets disappear, and how many separate weekends your town has to absorb.
The Year Land of Oz Went Quiet
Autumn at Oz didn't skip 2025 because Hurricane Helene damaged the park directly. It skipped because the people who run it decided a mountaintop attraction that had grown from a small employee reunion into a nine-day, tens-of-thousands-of-visitors event needed a hard look at its own operations and infrastructure before it kept scaling. The park said as much when it announced the pause, calling it a necessary step rather than a retreat.
That's an unusual choice for a seasonal business in a region still clawing back tourism dollars after a storm. Most attractions in Avery and Watauga counties spent 2025 trying to reopen faster, not slower. Land of Oz did the opposite: it closed its signature event for a full year to figure out what the next version should look like.
What They Tried While the Gates Were Locked
The answer showed up in June and July, before Autumn at Oz tickets ever went on sale. The park introduced Tea with Dorothy and Aunt Em, a limited-capacity summer experience capped under 1,700 tickets, priced at $95, and bundled with transportation and access to the Over the Rainbow Observation Deck. It sold out in a single day.
That's not a footnote. It's the test the park ran before deciding how to reopen its bigger, older event. Page Leidy, whose family owns the park, described the reopening in terms that made the intent plain:
"It's more than a theme park, it's a piece of living history."
A one-day sellout on a $95 ticket tells you something a press release does not: demand for anything Oz-branded in the High Country was not dampened by a year off. If anything, the pause built appetite. That's the piece of information locals need before they assume this September will move at the same pace as 2024's.
Three Weekends, Not One Big One
Autumn at Oz's 33rd annual run spans three specific weekends this year:
- September 11–13
- September 18–20
- September 25–27
General admission runs $70, with an $8 add-on for Overlook access and taxes and ticketing fees layered on at checkout. Guests who don't want the included shuttle can pay separately for a round-trip chairlift ride to the top, currently listed around $22. Every ticket is tied to a specific date and entry window, which is why the Land of Oz ticketing page is worth checking directly rather than assuming a walk-up option exists.
The park is projecting roughly 25,000 visitors across those three weekends combined. On paper, that sounds modest next to the numbers Banner Elk is used to seeing every October.
Why 25,000 Spread Over Nine Days Hits Different Than 20,000 in Two
Here's the comparison that actually matters if you live in this area. The Woolly Worm Festival, held on a single weekend in downtown Banner Elk, draws more than 20,000 attendees over two days according to the Banner Elk Chamber of Commerce. One event, one weekend, one traffic surge that the town has already built shuttle infrastructure around, as we covered when the festival added its own shuttle system.
Autumn at Oz spreads a similar total across three separate weekends and a much smaller footprint. The parking and shuttle staging happens at Beech Mountain Resort off Beech Mountain Parkway, a lot that also serves the ski area, mountain bikers, and everyday resort traffic the rest of the year. Instead of one concentrated weekend that the region absorbs and then moves past, September now delivers three distinct pulses of visitor traffic funneling through the same road and the same parking footprint, each one arriving before the leaf-color crowds that typically peak around the third week of October even show up.
That's the piece the generic "festival is back" coverage misses. The headline number sounds smaller than Woolly Worm's. The lived experience, for anyone who has to drive Beech Mountain Parkway on a mid-September Saturday, is three separate versions of festival traffic instead of one.
What This Means If You Live Here
If you're on Beech Mountain Parkway or anywhere that funnels toward Beech Mountain Resort, plan around all three weekends, not just the one everyone talks about. Errands, dinner reservations, and anything time-sensitive are easier to handle on Monday through Thursday during the back half of September this year.
Tickets have historically sold out for popular dates, and the sellout pattern on Tea with Dorothy this summer suggests that trend hasn't softened. If anyone in your household wants to go, buying early through the official Land of Oz site beats hoping for last-minute availability.
The Beech Mountain lot doubles as parking for the resort's other operations, so weekend mornings during these three windows will feel different than a typical September Saturday even if you have no interest in Dorothy, the Scarecrow, or the Yellow Brick Road. Knowing which three weekends carry that load, rather than treating the whole month as one long festival season, is the difference between planning around it and getting stuck behind it.
If you're weighing what a place like Beech Mountain or Banner Elk actually feels like to live in year-round, beyond a single festival weekend, our neighborhood guide to Banner Elk covers the rhythm of the seasons here in more depth.
Whether you're settled in for another mountain fall or thinking about what comes next for your own property in this area, Kelly Jones knows these towns block by block and season by season. Reach out anytime to talk through what's happening on the ground here, festival traffic included.
