February 8, 2007 issue
Buffalo Cove Outdoor Education Center—Striving For Balance
Story by Sam Calhoun
Nestled in the trough of the valley below Blowing Rock, on the border of Watauga, Wilkes and Caldwell counties, is a 200-acre sanctuary that the modern world has yet to deflower. Created in 2001, the Buffalo Cove Outdoor Education Center was built around the trickling headwaters of the Yadkin River and borders 6,000 acres of protected game land.
The setting is remote and as close to nature as can be achieved in this day and age—and that’s the point.
The Buffalo Cove Outdoor Education Center serves three purposes. Foremost, it is a camp for foster children from the inner city, but it also serves as a summer earth camp and an arena for custom-designed group experiences.
But the center, with its eight primitive and semisustainable structures, is much more than just a camp. It’s an attempt to redevelop connections with nature that have been lost generation after generation.
The two principal goals at the Buffalo Cove Outdoor Education Center are first, to help weave campers into the web of life through intimate contact with nature, and second, to create a physically and emotionally safe learning environment where individuals can find harmony and empowerment through self-understanding, self-confidence, simple living, friendships and fun.
To understand the thinking behind these goals, you must first get to know the director of the center, Nathan Roark.
Roark grew up in inner-city Atlanta and attended inner-city schools.
“I was downtown, downtown, you know,” said Roark.
From an early age, Roark can remember having a strong desire to learn about the woods. He used to take field guides to the city parks, identifying plants and tracking raccoons through the polluted city creeks whenever he had a free moment.
Luckily, Roark’s family was very supportive of their son’s connection to nature and when Roark was 12, they introduced him to Mark Warren—a naturalist who ran the Medicine Bow Wilderness School in Dahlonega, Ga. Over the next several years, Warren taught Roark everything he knew about their ancestors’ outdoor survival skills—making a one-match fire, hunting, fishing, surviving in the wilderness with little or no supplies, low-impact camping, using hand tools, tracking animals, archery, blacksmithing and the like.
“But most importantly,” said Roark. “He showed me that it could be done.”
Roark spent many hours and days in the woods with Warren and eventually started helping him teach students about these outdoor skills that were meant to reestablish individual, human connections with the earth, the woods.
“He taught me that this type of education was needed,” said Roark.
Teaching for Warren at Wilderness Bow opened up new doors for Roark. He took jobs teaching wilderness survival for the Eagle’s Nest Foundation in Brevard, for Hampshire College Outdoor Programs while he attended Hampshire College majoring in American Indian studies, for the Outdoor Academy of Appalachia and for the Turtle Island Preserve in Boone.
“It all gave me another set of eyes,” he added.
In 1995, Roark came to the High Country to be the program director at Turtle Island. Six years later in 2001, he was ready to leave and pursue another venture when a new door opened in his life—a door that would lead to the creation of the Buffalo Cove Outdoor Education Center.
One of Roark’s old students from the Outdoor Academy of Appalachia had started a foster child organization called CHARLEE—that stands for Children Have All Rights: Legal, Educational, Emotional. CHARLEE is a privatized foster care agency that helps severely abused and neglected children from Miami-Dade County in Florida. The former student had spoken highly of Roark to members of the organization and when Roark was ready to leave Turtle Island, CHARLEE approached him and asked if he would start a camp for foster children, offering help to find funding for construction.
By summer 2001, Roark and three friends had built a primitive camp—just the way they wanted it—on 200 acres, 12 miles south of Blowing Rock. The camp welcomed its first foster children that summer and by summer 2002, the camp was fully operational.
The camp is built on what Roark calls “steep, beautiful, rugged country” that has a “rich biodiversity.” Because of the land’s ruggedness, there has been limited logging.
“The land just spoke to me,” said Roark. “It is perfect.”
Roark and his friends built the camp as alternative as they could while still meeting code requirements, but they also made the buildings and their designs educational. The base camp encompasses 30 acres in the core of the center. A timber frame, Norwegian-looking main lodge sits on a hill and serves as the dining hall, kitchen and camp office. There’s a bathhouse that probably wouldn’t have had hot water if code didn’t require it, neighbored by a small pond for swimming and fishing. Down the trough of the Yadkin River is a log barn that contrasts with the other timber frame structures. Made from native timbers and built with old-world hand tools, the barn is where the woodworking at camp takes place and where the tools are stored. A blacksmith shop is also made with native timbers. For the campers, Roark constructed four sleeping shelters that he describes as “glorified tree houses” and are suspended off the ground with one side dug into the banks of the hill.
The only electricity runs to the lodge and bathhouse, and there is on-demand propane heated hot water. Solar power is used for lighting. Roark hopes one day to raise the funds to build an off-the-grid building for educational purposes at the camp, demonstrating hydro and solar power.
“It’s one giant playground and classroom,” Roark added.
In addition to the structures, the camp is home to several organic gardens, miles of trails where signs of bears and bobcats abound and multiple backpacking campsites. There are canoes, whitewater rafts and a challenge course.
Attendance at the camp is limited for educational quality and low-impact reasons—Roark only allows 40 people in the camp at one time, counselors included. He offers four sessions for foster children every summer, lasting 8 to 12 days each, and one session of summer earth camp, lasting 1 to 2 weeks, that is open to anyone who wishes to attend. Over one summer, roughly 100 campers lay claim to Buffalo Cove.
Recently, Roark partnered with the Two Rivers Community School to conduct outdoor programs for students in the third through eighth grade—one in the fall and one in the spring. This partnership excites Roark because he gets to create lasting relationships with the children and watch their progress as they become aware and more in tune with their natural surroundings. He custom designs each program—whether a naturalist hike or a canoe trip—to fit the teachers’ curricula—so it’s a curricular activity, not an extracurricular activity.
Roark’s motto is “strive for balance.” This motto relates to everything he wishes to achieve at the camp.
“It’s more about helping everyone to redevelop a connection with nature and the earth,” said Roark, “and asking ourselves how can we balance ourselves to reestablish that connection.”
At the camp, foster children learn traditional woodworking and how to make fire by friction, how to make a low-impact camp and how to canoe, how to track and how to trek.
“The idea is to provide high-quality education and to foster connections and to maintain connections. People these days don’t have a connection to the natural world. We need to reestablish these connections and keep them alive,” said Roark. “We teach them everything from traditional living skills to low-impact camping, leaving no trace. We show them that there’s a lot of different ways to be in the woods. We’re losing [our connection to nature and the woods]. Every generation becomes less and less connected.”
Roark prides himself on offering a more holistic option than traditional backcountry camps.
“We don’t just look at rocks to climb them, we look at the plants around them and the trees above them. We have to be stewards, not just recreators,” he said.
Earth skills, he continued, are not Native American skills—they’re human skills.
“No matter where you came from, your ancestors used these skills,” Roark said.
“Everyone needs to get into the woods. It should not be a socioeconomic opportunity,” he continued speaking about the foster children his camp teaches. “It’s so innate—it’s within us. It’s a mandatory part of our genetic makeup. It’s so real for people and it’s the missing link.”
Every camper who winds down the holler to Buffalo Cove doesn’t leave the same. There are too many stories of success and revelation to categorize. Everyone who attends is affected and feels closer to nature.
About $100,000 is needed to make the camp run for one full year. CHARLEE pays for the campers to come and provides two counselors, but the camp’s other programs must provide the funds to make ends meet. Roark has survived financially so far, but he’s looking for grants to help support the camp’s future.
In the fall and spring, Roark conducts the outdoor programs with Two Rivers and in the summer, from May until August, he puts in roughly 2,500 hours at the camp. “It takes 100 percent all the time,” he said. In the foster care world, Roark said, the burnout rate is high among teachers and caregivers, but Roark—although he admits he is not technically a foster caregiver—prides himself on finding dedicated individuals who love the woods and want to pass it on. But he’s not singling out the foster children; he has learned that everyone needs attention, regardless of his/her background.
The winter is Roark’s time for family and his homestead, located deep within a hollow in Triplett. Roark with his wife of 10 years, Holly—who teaches dance at ASU—live in an octagonal log home with their two daughters—Cora, 8, and Maddie, 6. While the children attend school at Two Rivers and Holly teaches, Roark tends to the garden, hunts to provide meat for the winter, cuts wood for heat, milks the goats and plans new curricula. Their home was built primarily with wood from the land in 1998 and the only power comes from two small solar panels; propane runs the lights and a shower. They have chickens, dairy goats, dogs and cats. Many of their vegetables come from their organic garden or are gathered from the woods. They raise their meat on the homestead or hunt it in the forest; they don’t buy it from the store. Roark uses winter to balance his life with his family and his homestead.
Whether paddling a whitewater river, strolling on a nature hike or walking into the woods for a week with only a knife, Roark can be found on his homestead or ten miles away at Buffalo Cove as a patient, veteran instructor and as an avid student. It has become Roark’s life work to help others see the beauty and wisdom in the southern Appalachian Mountains and the strength that everyone possesses within.
For more information, call 828-265-2911 or click to www.buffalocove.com.
For more information on CHARLEE, click to www.charleeprogram.org.
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