BARNARDSVILLE, N.C. (828newsNOW) — When Tropical Storm Helene moved out of Western North Carolina in late September, Buncombe County residents faced the death and destruction left behind.
That view is not what Navitat Sales and Marketing Director Teresa De Castro and Guest Services Manager Ilze Zageris are used to.
“It’s very special to us to be out on the line and to view these mountains from the lines and take in the experience like that,” De Castro said.
“You can see the Blue Ridge Mountains, you can see the (Blue Ridge) Parkway, if you look closely enough. And I remember just like this realization of like, this is where I work. So it doesn’t matter how many times you zip the lines, it’s still mesmerizing to me. And that’s why a lot of our guests are people that come back here year after year after year,” Zageris said.
Navitat, a unique tree-based adventure center about 30 minutes north of Asheville, was lucky — hundreds of trees down but no damage to structures or assets. But not all of its neighbors in the Barnardsville community were so fortunate.
“They’re really tough people,” De Castro said. “We were here the day after the storm, and one of our longest-term employees actually lives on this road (Poverty Branch). When that bridge was out, there was no getting off of this road. So, there were people coming and meeting on each side of the road trying to find out, ‘What do you need?’ Where do you need us was kind of their response.”
Navitat employees jumped right in.
They used the park’s offroad vehicles to get out into the community and deliver life-saving goods and help.
“Going out to some of these areas that had not been reached and, yeah, it was even a full seven days later they were still reaching home homes that had not had contact,” Zageris said.
She described it as a robust coming together.
“They would have meetings at the post office and just kind of making a plan and everything,” Zageris said.
“It was really mesmerizing for me. Sometimes I feel like we’re in the little bubble here at Navitat. But when we would drive to the post office or back or something, people would recognize the shirts that we have. We had about five of our staff who live locally and really they went above and beyond and donated their time. We provided the resources, but it was them doing this, this hard, hard work, emotional work, physical work to be out in the community, and they went, I think, for 10 straight days.”
The community responded quickly, creating committees to help the community, De Castro said.
“You’re the medical team, you’re the resource gathering team, you’re the transportation team. It was so, I mean, I’ve never seen anything like that,” she said.
The community is slowly recovering.
D&D Grocery is bustling with business while, just down the road, Sheena’s Restaurant sits empty.
“That’s, hopefully, coming back,” De Castro said.
In between the two Barnardsville Highway businesses, Ivy Creek left a trail of mud, debris and devastation.
“This place out here, yeah, they’re scattered, but, when needed, everyone came together so fast and was like, let’s go,” De Castro said.
Navitat, which closed early last year because of Helene, is coming back, too.
Most of the impact there was on the roads employees use to drive guests to the top of the course.
“We were very lucky to be spared. All of our physical assets, like our vehicles and our building, were untouched. There was no flooding on the property because of the elevation,” De Castro said.
There were two small landslides on the property.
“Luckily no larger landslides, so it was mostly clearing rather than having to rebuild the road,” De Castro said.
Other work is going on, too. The welcome center is being remodeled. A commercial kitchen is being built. The bathrooms were redone last year.
“We try to make the most of every moment that we get when the customers are not here,” De Castro said.
Navitat usually opens in early March with the season ending in November. The plan this year is to open in late March.
“Just to give us a little bit of wiggle room,” De Castro said. “To make sure we’re ready and to make sure that there’s guests in town, too.”
Navitat has a long-term lease on the 200-plus acres off Poverty Branch Road. The same family has owned the property since before the Civil War. There’s history there. Part of the property used to be pasture. There’s an abandoned hunting cabin and cherry and apple trees — evidence of what the property used to be.
It now sports ziplines. Navitat has a Mountaintop Tour and Treetop Express, along with an RTV Shadow Tour. The Treetop Tour is a traditional canopy tour. The Mountaintop Tour is “the closest to flying you can get without jumping off a plane,” De Castro said.
Crews have been busy working on the grounds. But it’s mostly been small clearing.
Evidence of Helene won’t be gone when the new season starts.
“We’ll clear the road and trails, but this is nature,” De Castro said looking at the many fallen trees to the side of the picnic area. “We are in a natural environment, and we don’t intend to go above and beyond to clear things. It’s just what it is. It will, it’s part of the life cycle of the forest.”
Navigating our habitat is how Navitat got its name.
“The idea was to really find a way to play in the trees. We tried to preserve and be minimally invasive,” De Castro said. “The idea is that if we were to ever leave this business and take down all the cables and the brakes and take the equipment with us and tear down this building that you would barely know that anything was ever here.”
De Castro and Zageris are excited about the new season.
“We cannot wait to welcome these guests,” De Castro said.
“When the season is happening, I get to talk to people. I get to meet people. Every day is a little bit different. I get to go outside, and I get to be inside, and I get to, you know, run around and be crazy,” Zageris said. “Winter has been very hard because we got cut off two months early.”