If all had gone well, work would already be underway to transform Black Mountain’s aging Cragmont Park into a community recreation hub.
Plans called for repairing or replacing crumbling tennis and basketball courts, building six pickleball courts, adding a youth soccer field, improving the parking lot and installing restrooms (the closest restrooms are at Lake Tomahawk Park across the street). Last summer, Town Council agreed to spend nearly $500,000 on those improvements and more at the 5.14-acre site on Swannanoa Avenue.
“We had a vision for how to really transform it into something that was going to serve a greater population in Black Mountain than it currently does,” says Town Council member Doug Hay. “It was going to be a pretty cool project.”
But when Tropical Storm Helene hit, the renovations were put on hold as town officials and employees went into recovery mode.
Hay and others held out hope the project could be revived. But with Black Mountain facing $27 million in recovery costs, the money was needed elsewhere, he says. That included repairs to Veterans Park, the Lakeview Center for Active Aging, the town’s public works building and other storm-damaged properties.
In March, Town Council and Harper General Contractors Inc., the contractor for the Cragmont project, agreed to terminate the contract and scrap the renovations.
“It’s a huge disappointment for myself personally,” Hay says. “It’s a major loss for Black Mountain just because that park needs a lot of work. The basketball and tennis courts have not been touched in 20 years, and they’re all falling apart. The park needed a lot of upkeep prior to the storm and now even more so.”
Black Mountain is not the only local community that had to delay a planned recreation project in the wake of Helene. Among those affected were the Ecusta Trail, a greenway that eventually will run from Hendersonville to Brevard via an abandoned rail line, and Woodfin’s Taylor’s Wave, an artificial whitewater wave in the French Broad River.
Xpress takes a look at where those projects stand nearly seven months after Helene.
Ecusta Trail: Back on track (for now)
Henderson County started paving and other work on the first 6-mile stretch of the Ecusta Trail last summer. Known as Phase 1, the path that runs from downtown Hendersonville to the Horse Shoe community was scheduled to be done by the end of 2024. Officials hoped the remaining 13.4 miles would be completed by the end of 2027.
But Helene-related delays have set the project timeline back about six months.
A portion of the under-construction stretch suffered about $400,000 in damage from the storm. Particularly hard hit was an area west of downtown Hendersonville that was flooded and eroded by Shaw’s Creek.
“There was a base layer of asphalt down through that section, and some of that got undercut,” says Mark Tooley, president of the nonprofit Friends of the Ecusta Trail. But things could have been worse, he points out. No section of the trail was wiped out, and all the bridges survived.
“Marcus Jones, the county engineer for Henderson County, has commented several times that the damage was not near what he thought it would be, given the level of the water from Shaw’s Creek,” Tooley says.
The damage, combined with the N.C. Department of Transportation diverting resources to Helene recovery, put the trail work on hold for months. But the damaged areas have been fixed, and Phase 1 work has resumed with hopes of it being completed by the end of June, Tooley says.
The remaining two sections of the trail — about 5 miles in Henderson County and 8 miles in Transylvania County — are in the design and engineering phase with hopes of work beginning next year and being done by late 2027 or early 2028, Tooley says.
“Everybody’s got their heads down and is forging forward trying to get it done as soon as possible,” Tooley says.
There is a possible snag, however, for the Transylvania County portion of the trail. The Trump administration has frozen two federal grants that were awarded to the City of Brevard under the Biden administration. City Manager Wilson Hooper is not sure of the exact issues but says President Donald Trump has previously expressed objections to money being spent on bicycle infrastructure.
“I don’t know if this grant will survive the review,” he said, according to the WNC Times. “I don’t know if it will have parts of it that are clawed back by the feds or what.”
Key players in the development include Conserving Carolina, which holds legal title to the 19-mile rail corridor, Friends of the Ecusta Trail, Henderson County, the cities of Hendersonville and Brevard and the town of Laurel Park. The state and federal governments have provided funding as well.
Taylor’s Wave: Rapid advance
In June, the Town of Woodfin began work on Taylor’s Wave, an artificial whitewater river wave on the French Broad River. Construction was set to begin in October on the $4.8 million rock and concrete ledge that will divert the river’s current to create a whitewater “wave.”
The wave, along with an expansion of Riverside Park, is a key component of the ambitious $34 million Woodfin Greenway & Blueway project, which officials hope will help rebrand the small Buncombe County town as an outdoor recreation destination.
The good news is Helene did not change the course of the French Broad enough to make design changes necessary for the wave.
“We were worried about that,” says Town Manager Shannon Tuch. “We had to wait for conditions to stabilize, and then we did a whole bunch of new measurements, had it resurveyed. In the end, the engineers concluded that it wasn’t a material change.”
The effects of the storm delayed the schedule for Taylor’s Wave by about six to seven months, she estimates. “It’s hard to say how much our schedule has been impacted because the schedule was fluid to begin with. Working in the river, it’s very weather dependent.”
Originally, work on the Riverside Park expansion was set to begin after the wave was built, but because accessing the river was impossible immediately after Helene, workers began removing 26 cubic yards of fill material in preparation for the expansion.
Those workers were diverted again to repair a stream bank in Riverside Park, but they are now back to fill removal. Tuch hopes work on the wave itself will begin next month.
“When we were planning to start construction in October, we didn’t necessarily anticipate finishing the wave [in 2024],” she says. “We were going to build maybe just half of it and then try to build the other half this spring. But now that we’re starting in the spring, we’re gonna try to build the whole thing this year.”
