When All Hell Breaks Loose: Part II

Operators and vendors in North Carolina navigate the challenges posed by Hurricane Helene in this two-part series.

Aerial adventure operators and vendors in North Carolina were among those impacted when Hurricane Helene unleashed horrific, devastating flooding in the western North Carolina mountains over three days in late September. The worst-hit areas around Asheville saw unimaginable amounts of water. The flooding wiped out some river towns, tearing homes and buildings from their foundations and sweeping away everything in its path.

Over the longer term, people wonder how the region will recover. The tourism-dependent economy has been brought to a standstill, and as one person who spoke with API said, “a return to 100 percent normalcy within the next six months to a year is not realistic. It’s going to take a lot of time for many of these communities to rebuild.”

In part one, we looked at the damage done, the immediate responses, and the long-term challenges of several North Carolina outdoor and aerial adventure operators, including French Broad Adventures, The Gorge, and the Adventure Center of Asheville. Here, we share the stories of three more operators and vendors grappling with the impacts of Hurricane Helene.

Navitat Canopy Adventures: It Takes a Village

In late October, a month after the hurricane, Navitat co-founder and partner John Walker reported, “We are well into recovery efforts at Navitat. Even so, we decided to close for the remainder of the season and reopen in March.

“Our small town of Barnardsville, just outside of Asheville, was hit particularly hard,” he said. “Many locals were stranded and in need of acute help. Right after the storm, higher priorities existed than the state of our zip line courses. We left that analysis and repair on hold until the local community could be stabilized.

Recovery was a community effort. “People just came out and helped where they could,” Walker said. “We were immediately woven into the town of Barnardsville, which has not been the case for us for so many years, at least not to the extent it should.

“A core group of our guides volunteered immediately, shuttling supplies and nurses into remote areas. Navitat resources were greatly beneficial, including UHF radios, our fleet of off-road vehicles, access to water, fuel, remote batteries (from our Night Operation), etc. This assistance lasted eight to 10 days.

“Our canopy guides can drive 4x4s and are risk-aware with basic first aid and wilderness sensibilities. They also know how to talk to strangers, and are great at keeping people moving towards success and completion. Along with Navitat’s equipment, they were well suited to provide disaster relief.”

A local construction company fixed the roads little by little over the first two weeks so that they were at least passable by ATVs and side-by-sides. Anyone who could handle a chainsaw was out clearing roads and driveways. “Things happened faster than we expected; the bridge to our house was a mass of debris. When we saw it, we imagined we’d be trapped for weeks. But our neighbors had it cleared that evening,” lead operations manager Mike Birch said.

One longtime local employee started thinking about which people might immediately need help and would be hardest to reach. Navitat staff helped provide supplies and were the first boots on the ground along several roads.

Local residents set up a supply and service center in town, eventually basing out of an unused former firehouse. A dozen locals served as the core organizers. The hub eventually provided hot meals as well, plus medical services, thanks to resident nurses and doctors who volunteered their time. They offered a wellness center, counseling, acupuncture and massage. Navitat staff provided transport for teams to do wellness checks and supply drops.

“A lot of communities way back in the holler, especially the more impoverished communities, tend to not react very well to official-looking people,” Navitat employee Kate Thomas told API. “But when we came rolling up, slinging through a creek, people were like, ‘Oh, you’re like one of us.’ And so we were able to connect them to medical professionals. The nurses started requesting us to go out with them even after they didn’t need our vehicles anymore because folks trusted our Navitat vehicles more than a stranger in a white coat.”

One woman, recalled Navitat employee Dory Farlessyost, said that with all the other disasters she had lived through, this was the first time anyone had knocked on her door—no one had ever cared before, she said through tears. “She felt really cared for, and now we’re all friends,” Farlessyost said.

“Anytime someone sees a Navitat shirt, they recognize we’re not just a zip line company. They know we care about the community and want to be good neighbors. We have a close relationship not just with people on our road, but the whole town,” Birch said.

While supplies were more than ample as we spoke for this article, Farlessyost asked that share a link to an organization that is providing ongoing services and funds.

Sky Valley Zip Tours: Keep on Trucking

While most adventure parks and adventure operators API spoke with escaped major damage, owner/operator Jack Sharp’s Sky Valley is the exception. A small creek runs down the middle of his 140-acre property in Boone, and flooding wreaked havoc on his ATV trails. Recovery was slowed by impacts to his vendor, Challenge Design Innovations (CDI), and the evacuation of many of his employees—students at Appalachian State University in Boone, which shut down for weeks. Most of them simply went home.

His immediate task, like that of most, was to cut and remove trees. Once communications and power were restored, he started getting in touch with employees, CDI, and guests.

His next big task was refunding guests. “We got in touch with our clients, whether they missed their tour or it was upcoming, as soon as were able,” Sharp said. “Most got refunds. A few rolled those over to a gift card.

“When you have to refund all the money that you brought in for your second-busiest time of the year, it puts you in a panic. With all the damage and the stuff that was going on, you have a real sinking feeling.”

Sharp also set to work repairing the damage to the property. Most of that was flood related. “The creek runs right down through the valley, and it just washed away so much material,” Sharp said. “One of our culvert bridges was basically solid concrete, so it didn’t move, but it washed away on either side.

“I had three bridges that I’ve built because we also do electric ATV tours. One bridge, unbelievably, did not get touched by the water. But two of them, I watched them go down the river. These steel and aluminum bridges just floated down like they were rafts.

“There’s a dam on my property and a small lake. The bridges ended up in the lake along with thousands of cubic yards of material, silt, rocks, everything you can imagine—I can’t quantify it.”

Among the few staff that were still around was operations manager Steve Moize. After the first week, he was able to show up almost every day, though his usual 45-minute commute had become two hours. “He and I have been basically digging all the material out of the lake and trying to rebuild the stream channel and rebuild the bridges,” Sharp said.

Two trees fell on the zip line course, affecting two lines on the 10-line course. CDI was able to inspect the course, and Sharp expected the damage will be repaired by mid- to late-December. It’s possible Sky Valley will open for Christmas and New Year’s, depending on the weather and staffing. “We wanted to operate on a modified course but weren’t able to do it,” Sharp said.

Still, Sharp is looking forward to the spring. “We open typically in March with a small schedule, depending on what the staff scene looks like. Then we’re typically seven days a week by April 1.” He believes it possible the season will be normal or better, as people return for the experiences they missed out on this year and to support the mountain communities.

All that assumes that Sharp can manage to pay for all the work that must be done. Applying for SBA loans and other aid, he said, has been confusing. The SBA disaster fund was depleted before he could complete his application, and Congress didn’t go back into session until after the November elections. When funds will be available was still not known in mid-November. “It was a terrible mistake to allow those funds to run out,” he said.

In addition, he was not able to receive funding from FEMA or his insurance company. As a result, he reopened his construction company to provide some income.

Like others we spoke with, he’s been frustrated by insurance issues. “We have loss of revenue protection in our insurance policy, but it’s directly related to loss of revenue due to damage,” he said. And while his property did suffer damage, his losses also come from the economic downturn that’s occurred in the wake of the hurricane.

Given the cost of insurance, the lack of help stings. “When I open up my checking account and I look at what our fixed costs are, that (the cost of insurance) is hurting me. Thousands of dollars a month and not getting any help. I know it’s legal and I know it’s contracts and fine print and the way it’s written, but it’s just challenging that when you pay a lot of money and then you need it and you can’t get it.

“I might end up being really surprised in a good way by how our insurer responds to our needs, but, I feel like that’s been disappointing,” he said.

“In the meantime, we’ll just keep working and keep swinging at every pitch.”

Challenge Towers/High Gravity Adventure Park: Caring for The Community

High Gravity and its sister company Challenge Towers “fared well” through Helene, though not without impacts. The park, in Blowing Rock, lost its zip line, but it was down for only a few weeks. The Challenge Towers HQ in Todd, just north of Boone, and the Asheville office were relatively unscathed. The biggest worry, said High Gravity’s Carson Rivers, was for their staffs, past and present.

The company strove to learn how its employees fared “as far as damage or even being alive” were concerned, Carson said. Fortunately, “everyone’s alive and reasonably well, we’re lucky and thankful.”

For a week after the hurricane passed, “All of us were focused on our area,” said Ken Jacquot, Challenge Tower’s founder. “Carson basically cut all the downed trees just to get to his mother. I was doing the same in our own neighborhood; all that took days.” One employee lost the bridge from his property, and it took days to repair it. Most employees had their own stories about helping out with their neighbors.

“The folks coming in from out of town (think FEMA and other aid organizations) trying to help are wonderful, and we thank them so much for being here,” Rivers said. “But they are a sea of people trying to figure out how to help, and they don’t know how.” (Aside from the linemen who restored the electrical grid, that is.)

“The people that actually live here are just head down with chainsaws running, figuring it out. That’s what I saw within our employee base as well,” Rivers added. Western North Carolina is full of resilient people, he said; life in the Appalachian Mountains is hard living. Always has been. Generations have grown up on that kind of work ethic.

“You keep hearing about all the divisions in society,” Jacquot observed. “And politics has kind of colored what’s happened with the overall recovery effort. But here on the ground, what we’ve done is just a beautiful thing. It’s awesome to be a part of the recovery and helping out.”

While the communities recovered quickly, business returned more slowly. Not surprisingly, the hurricane “totally crushed our fall,” Rivers said. “We’re going to have maybe 10 percent of the revenue we would normally have in the month of October. And we lost the last weekend of September, which is when the actual storm was.”

High Gravity was not completely without visitors, though. The week after the storm, HG opened part of the facility to locals only, and for free. “We basically just said, it’s been a crazy and really stressful week so just come play, let out some stress and have a good time.” Over two days, 500 people showed up.

Business was just beginning to return at the beginning of November; the “don’t go to western North Carolina” messaging was still keeping most folks away.

“All that was very appropriate at the beginning,” Rivers said, “But when do you start to change that message? At what point do you start to cause secondary financial disaster in a community that’s supported by tourism?” While the messaging evolved as appropriate for the most-affected areas, he noted, it caused unnecessary harm to adjacent parts of the state.

Jacquot agreed. “The economy is getting really hurt by this. Beyond the structures and the lives, where are people going to find work?” he asked.

Challenge Towers itself didn’t have a specific project disrupted by the storm. “The primary project we were working on during the storm had our crew down in Alabama, and they didn’t even stop working that day,” Rivers said. “Most of Challenge Tower’s building tools and resources are housed in Asheville, where all roads “were closed for a brief minute,” he added. “It didn’t turn into a big logistical issue for us.”

Other vendors in the area that Rivers spoke with were in similar situations. “I haven’t heard of a vendor company that’s been impacted by this so bad that they’re at risk of the business or something like that.”

None of that minimizes Helene’s impact. “If you line up the timeline of your life and figure out which points deserve a blip on the timeline, this was one of those blips. Ken was saying this was most flooding he’s ever seen. To be clear, it’s the most anyone alive here has ever seen.

“It’s that level of significant for us, for the communities,” said Rivers. “The impact is big, and it’ll take a long time to recover.

“But we will.”

In the first article in this two-part series, we shared the stories of three more operators grappling with the impacts of Hurricane Helene. These included French Broad Adventures, The Gorge, and the Adventure Center of Asheville. Read about their experiences here.