Brother Wolf buys Tunnel Road site for new adoption center

Brother Wolf Animal Rescue has secured a Tunnel Road building once home to Black Dome Mountain Sports, turning a storm-ravaged recovery into a concrete plan for a new Asheville adoption center near downtown. The purchase gives the nonprofit a permanent foothold after Tropical Storm Helene destroyed its Glendale Avenue campus on Sept. 27, 2024.

For Buncombe County, the move matters for more than real estate. Brother Wolf said the rebuilt site is meant to expand adoptions, support overcrowded shelter partners and help animals move more quickly into homes. The rescue has been operating as a foster-based organization since floodwaters wiped out its Glendale Avenue adoption center off Swannanoa River Road, leaving it without a permanent base.

The new location sits on one of Asheville’s busiest commercial corridors and gives Brother Wolf a visible, central presence near downtown Asheville. Black Dome Mountain Sports, which had occupied the property, said it had served Asheville for 40 years and was located about half a mile from downtown via the Beaucatcher Tunnel, making the site a familiar one for drivers, shoppers and residents moving through the city’s core.

Brother Wolf’s rebuilding effort comes after months of disruption to a nonprofit that has long woven together adoption, pet retention programs, a low-cost mobile spay-and-neuter clinic, shelter-transfer partnerships and volunteer and foster networks. The organization says it has saved the lives of more than 100,000 animals since 2007, and it said more than 1,000 animals were adopted from a temporary location after the storm, with the ASPCA sharing its facility.

The rescue’s phase-one rebuilding campaign has cited a goal of $1.5 million, and a separate donation push said gifts were matched up to $850,000. Those fundraising efforts are now tied to a tangible next step: renovating the Tunnel Road building into a new adoption center that can restore capacity for animals, adopters and community support in Asheville and across Buncombe County.

Brother Wolf’s executive director, Leah Craig Chumbley, called the purchase a major moment in the rebuilding process and thanked the community for making it possible. For a rescue that has spent the past year operating without its own campus, the new site marks a shift from emergency adaptation to a long-term rebuild built around access, volume and local reach.