Buncombe County Parks Reopen Six of Seven River Corridor Sites After Helene

Cane Creek's soccer fields will mark their return with a ribbon cutting and sculpture unveiling on April 4, a milestone that captures both how far Buncombe County's park system has come since Tropical Storm Helene and how far it still has to go.

Six of the seven parks along the county's river corridor have reopened, with Buncombe County Parks & Recreation reporting completed repairs that include dock replacements at Lake Julian and full field restoration at Cane Creek, where U.S. Army Corps crews had staged tree debris and conducted remediation work after the storm. The fields are back. The docks are replaced. Youth sports leagues and community programs disrupted since Helene can begin reclaiming those spaces.

Three sites remain closed: Alexander River Park, Karpen Field and Charles D. Owen Park in Swannanoa. Owen Park stands apart. River course changes and the destruction of amenities throughout the site put its full restoration in the tens of millions of dollars, making it the most expensive and complex recovery project in the county's parks system. Before Owen reopens, the county must secure a combination of FEMA mitigation and recovery funding, state grants and local allocations, then complete engineering work including riverbank stabilization and floodplain redesign. Each step is contingent on grant approvals and contractor availability, meaning a firm reopening timeline does not yet exist.

The scale of what Helene left behind required coordination far beyond county staff. The Army Corps worked alongside multiple contracting teams on bank stabilization, tree removal and infrastructure repairs across the affected corridor. That federal and state partnership made the six reopenings possible, but the same framework now governs what comes next for the three still-closed sites.

County officials acknowledged that rebuilt facilities will incorporate greater flood resilience, a recognition that restoring to pre-Helene standards would leave parks vulnerable to future flooding along the French Broad and its tributaries.

For families whose kids play soccer at Cane Creek or whose summer plans run through the fishing docks at Lake Julian, the restoration of those amenities represents the most immediate dividend of a recovery effort now measured in months. For the Swannanoa community, where Owen Park served as a central gathering space, the wait continues while the county works through a financing and engineering process with no fixed end date.

The April 4 celebration at Cane Creek offers a concrete moment to mark the progress. Owen Park offers no such date yet.