Wrong Way River Lodge & Cabins: 16 Tiny A-frame Cabins along the French Broad in Asheville

This is the Asheville that Joe and I love. We selected this site specifically because it's on the Greenway and the Greenway runs along the French Bluff River and connects all these different parts of town. It's a place that Joe and I come with our families and we just felt like this is our Asheville and we want to share it with people. My name is Joe Balkan. My name is Shelton Steele. And we're the co-owners of Wrong Way River Lodge and Cabins. Wrong Way River Lodge and Cabins is a urban cabin campground. We're situated three miles away from downtown Asheville but we're also right across the road from the Greenway and the river at the intersection of the outdoors and urban amenities. I would say the design and the construction process are very reflective of a first-time project for Joe and I. We were as hands-on as the contractors would let us be here every day and you know the site really dictated what kind of structures we could build and how we could tie everything together. So most of our design decisions related specifically to problems that needed to be solved on the property. All of our cabins connect on a single walkway that leads back to the lodge. That was a result of building two different walls to hold the hillside up and in doing so it created a path and so that's now our cabin trail and you walk on French Broad River Stone to get to your cabin on this hillside walkway. One of the design elements that we leaned really hard in on was that the cabins and the lodge were represented by the trees that were here. When we took them down we sent them to a mill. It's about 20 miles from here. That's the floor that is in this room. We also were able to repurpose some barn wood from a local youth camp down in Old Fort North Carolina to make countertops and vertical members for the closets and the shelving. This is what the wood came in looking like and then this is what we did to it to make it into the countertop. We wanted to minimize the amount of new lumber material that we would source so a nod to the sustainability value. The story that I used to tell when I was on a whitewater rafting trip with commercial guests, the French Broad River is one of three rivers in the world that flow from south to north the wrong way. It is true that it flows from south to north. It's not true that it's only one of three rivers in the world. Just about every community that has a south to north flowing river has the same story. It was a great nod to a river that is such a big part of our business so Wrong Way became our name. That Wrong Way name has kind of evolved to also encompass our approach to traditional concepts. We are not a traditional campground. We created an experience called volunteerism. Alongside all other experiences that you can sign up for as a guest, the whitewater rafting, the tour through Asheville, you can sign up for our volunteerism experience which essentially will allow you to get connected with some of the local non-profits to work on local service projects. We've got an event space in the ground level of the lodge and then we've got a small conference room upstairs. So we have this kind of mix and match where people can work and then there's the greenway and the river they can get outside and have you know an experience. I think if you do any kind of project in Asheville you can take your idea and then share it with all these different artists that are in this town. It always gets better once an artist reinterprets your idea. Our wooden animal heads that was a nod to River Lodge having dead animal mounts on the wall and doing it the wrong way we wanted to come up with something that was more playful. So there's an artist named Ben Grant and those are the animal heads that Ben came up with and they were above and beyond anything that I could have ever imagined. We positioned ourselves at that intersection of outdoors and the urban because it breaks down a lot of barriers to the outdoors and those folks that maybe wouldn't typically choose to be in a more traditional campground maybe that allows them to more easily access the outdoors. Maybe they'll take it a step further and eventually find themselves doing that whitewater rafting experience that they never thought that they would do. The Wrong Way River Lodge and Cabins are at 9 Midnight Drive in Asheville. To book your stay go to wrongwaycampground.com