Transcript
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Ever wonder how to transform a dream into reality amidst life's chaos.
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Today we're diving into such a story a really super cool story with Hartwell Carson, a visionary who turned family land into a breathtaking outdoor resort while balancing a full-time job, raising kids and leading a non-profit.
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Oh yeah, this was all during the challenges of the COVID pandemic.
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Hartwell's journey to begin an outdoor business during COVID was met with setbacks, like neighborhood resistance to the bike park, which was his first idea.
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But it led to a more harmonious vision, restoring old cabins and creating a serene, nature immersive retreat, complete with a professional gray tree house.
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And we're going to unpack all of that in this episode.
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We explore the story behind Cold Springs Base Camp, where Hartwell reimagined camping to make it more accessible and family friendly.
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Imagine trading cumbersome tents for cozy cabins equipped with essentials and fire pits, offering families a seamless way to reconnect with nature.
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This easy to get to destination is near popular hiking trails, world class whitewater climbing, hiking and fishing.
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It is the ultimate launchpad for adventure seekers.
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Finally, we'll dive into the art of crafting an off-the-grid paradise, from solar-powered cabins to a spring-fed cold plunge.
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Hartwell shares how sustainability and comfort come together in this family-driven endeavor.
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It's not just a business.
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It's a vibrant getaway, blending adventure and serenity.
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So if you're looking to get inspired by the beauty of the outdoors and the power of family-driven adventure, this episode is for you.
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Let's jump in and discover how Hartwell turned his vision into a thriving, nature-filled haven called Cold Springs Base Camp.
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You're listening to Exploration Local, a podcast designed to explore and celebrate the people and places that make the Blue Ridge and Southern Appalachian Mountains special and unique.
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My name is Mike Andrus, the host of Exploration Local.
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Join us on our journey to explore these mountains and discover how they fuel the spirit of adventure.
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We encourage you to wander far, but explore local.
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Let's go.
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During COVID people did all kind of weird stuff.
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You know like people, like big, tough dudes, started baking bread, and so I was like we should, you know, start an outdoor rec business or whatever.
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But me and my wife that's crazy, and it's not like you had a million other things going on in your life at the time, so yeah, I mean I had a full-time job.
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I had two kids.
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I have another nonprofit on the side.
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Yeah, I had plenty of stuff to do.
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I don't know why, but but it, it, it's been fun.
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So we we started to try to start a bike park in East Asheville and the neighbors went crazy, went back to the drawing board and we're like let's go, look for a great piece of land somewhere that the neighbors won't go crazy.
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And so I looked all around for months and finally my father-in-law was like you should come look at this piece of family land we have.
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And it was the summer, the overnight summer camp spot for his dad's camp, so my wife's granddad.
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They had a summer camp on Lake Summit and it closed down in the eighties but they kept the property and they would ride horses or hike over to this you know piece of land where they did their overnighters or whatever.
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So they had these old cabins and the first time I went there I honestly was like, ah, it's not that great.
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It was so overgrown that you couldn't see anything.
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You couldn't get down to the Creek, there was a waterfall that I couldn't see, and so but I went back in the winter and was like, oh, this place is awesome.
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Like I saw the cliffs and the waterfall and the Creek and the.
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You know, you could kind of envision, if you cleaned it up and fix the old rundown cabins, that it could be something.
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So we started on that.
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We bought it from his sister, so he ended up with his sister, so me and my father-in-law bought it, and then we started just cleaning it up, fixing the cabins up.
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I had this vision of a kind of a tree house resort.
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But we had these cabins already that were on the ground.
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There were sort of the Appalachian trail, a frame kind of style cabins Um, not, I'm sorry, not like Adirondack, you know, open air cabins, so but they were all rotten and fallen in.
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We fixed those up, build a couple of tent sites and then now we're kind of in the process of fulfilling the original vision, which is building a tree house.
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So we're in final stages of finishing the tree house, which is super cool.
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It's like that thing's amazing that show Treehouse Masters.
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Have you ever seen it?
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It's like watching that in person.
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Yeah, yeah we worked with this amazing guy, mark Craven.
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He's at Liminal Feats is his business Watching him out there.
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He'd be hanging 30 feet off the ground from a tree with a drill like the size of a small car, you know, drilling a hole through these giant trees, just strapped in, pushing himself off the tree to get enough leverage from the thing, putting these big bolts in the tree, and so seeing all that come together is pretty cool.
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When my daughter was little, she was like dad, I want to, I want to.
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We would hang out in the tree.
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In the front yard we had this big giant maple tree and you could climb up and sit in the tree and she's like we should build a tree house up here.
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And I was like, yeah, we should.
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And so I drilled one board and I was like this is the start of the tree house and that's all I have.
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And so she gave me crap for a bunch of years.
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She's like dad, there's, you've only put one board up.
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So this is sort of my fulfilling my promise to my daughter that I was going to build her a tree house, and this one is way better than the one I would have done.
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This is a pretty sweet tree house.
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Yeah, it's pretty awesome.
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Yeah, we got plumbing, we got HVAC, but we're also really high up in the trees.
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It's super surrounded by woods.
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You got a great view.
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I love camping and being outdoors, but I don't love camping right next to random people, which is what most campgrounds are.
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And so we've really tried with our place to like put you out in the woods, put you in a place to enjoy it, but not have you be like five feet from some guy's RV.
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And it's been great, it's super fun.
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It's busy and hard, but it's been really fun to like figure all that stuff out and just play around with.
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My father-in-law bought a excavator.
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He's like we need to excavate.
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I was like I don't do we really need to excavate?
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But now we have one.
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I'm like yeah, we did.
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Yeah, like we could lift this big rock up.
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That's so cool, that's so cool.
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Well, my first exposure to this was for the Outdoor Business Alliance.
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We had one of the summer socials out there and this place is beautiful because you have this road in and then you have your first rustic cabin that you run into and I don't know how many people that particular cabin sleeps.
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But yeah, like you're describing open air, obviously you've done a lot of reno on it.
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There's a fire pit out front.
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Then you got another area that's down a path where we had to kind of walk to and it was just the camping, a couple of campsites down there, and then another area where I'm assuming you could do like a rooftop tent.
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You could drive down there and do a rooftop tent and then you hike up to another area where you had another cabin.
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Then we hiked up to the waterfall, which is amazing, right on your property.
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And then the last thing, it was sort of the creme de la creme, as we kind of saw the tree house, the suspension bridge or whatever kind of leading up to it.
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And yeah, the whole, everything about this this place is, is unique because you can be your most rustic person in your tent.
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You can kind of step it up to be an open air lodge.
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You can do your own rooftop tent if you want.
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Yeah, I mean I love camping, and probably a lot of your listeners love camping too.
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But camping is really difficult, it's a pain in the ass.
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Let's be real, it's hard.
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It's expensive.
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You know you need a ton of gear.
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When I look, you know like pack my whole truck and it's like, oh, we're going camping for the night and it's like full of stuff.
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Right.
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So one reason I really love Cold Spring Base Camp our spot is it's so easy.
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Like you go to the cabins, there are beds, there are mattresses, there's a camp stove, there's dishware, there's pots and pans, there's firewood.
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You know you really got to show up with your sleeping bag and your food and if it rains you don't spend the next six hours like drying your tent out and cleaning your tent and cleaning your thermo rest and all the mud off of it.
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So it's kind of like making camping camping easy, which is, I think, what we're all going for, at least, maybe when we get to this age.
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Right, I know it may be, because I'm getting old.
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But you know I used to go like pack.
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I had a three quarter length thermo rest cause it saved weight, you know and now I have a camper and a campground, you know'm definitely not going light anymore.
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That's right.
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But it's great.
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It's a beautiful spot and it's situated right in the middle of a lot of really cool stuff.
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We're not far from DuPont.
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We're really close to Ride Rock Creek, the bike park.
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We're close to Ride Canuga, we're close to Flat Rock and Saluda and the Green River and the Gorge Zipline.
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It's a great spot, you know, down the gorge or go paddle the green river or go ride your bike and do pond or whatever, and so and I think that's why it's been popular is it's, you know, it's a spot people want to come to and now you've got a really cool spot to do it.
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So and this is a family affair.
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I mean, this isn't just you contracting out, getting other people to come at.
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Y'all are doing the work, the kids are doing the work, all y'all are doing the work.
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Yeah, it's fun.
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I take my kids up there all the time.
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My daughter reluctantly works, but I pay her like a couple bucks to clean the cabin.
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So she feels good about that, but my son's all about it.
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I'm like you want to go up to Cold Springs?
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He's like, yeah, and so he rides his bike along the trail but then he helps me build stuff.
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And you know, by helps that's like very generous term, but he's fun to hang out with.
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That's right.
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I have got him to like uh, you know, roll some paint around.
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The other day I was like, okay, this is kind of.
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I saw that on the bench.
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I was like all right, we're doing some stuff, so but it's cool.
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I mean it's a great place to grow up, like.
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I mean just hanging outside.
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And you know, like I said, we had an excavator and you know there's every little boy's period of life where they're obsessed with excavators.
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So he was in that period and we bought an excavator.
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That's awesome.
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So it took him out there the first time and we just like pick rocks up, he'd go pick them up, and we'd pick them up, and he'd go dump them, and we'd dump them on the ground, and so it was pretty fun.
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He's now like oh, excavators, whatever.
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But it's a great way to grow up and we're in the middle of some really cool projects.
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It's really cool now.
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What you saw is really cool, but in the very near future the tree house will be done.
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We're building an A-frame, a cool little enclosed A-frame.
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We have a bath house.
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We have a sauna.
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There's a box sitting there right now with a sauna in it.
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I just have to get around to building the sauna.
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There you go, and and I'm not like super handy Well, you can fool me, man.
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You're doing a lot of stuff out there.
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Well, I think people you know.
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It looks like I am on Instagram.
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Okay.
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It's a lot of like how do you do this?
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Youtube videos and a lot of friends coming by and I'm like, what do I do now?
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But that's kind of fun too, like I'm getting way better at stuff and I was hanging poplar siding this morning but I don't know how to do that, but it looks good.
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I made this angle cut.
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My friend let me borrow his chop saw, you know, and so it's fun.
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I mean, I like doing that stuff and it's providing folks with a great opportunity to get outside and enjoy nature in a way that isn't like a ton of trouble.
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So that feels good too.
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And we see a lot of families out there, you know, and you know, join a weekend together and you know that's what it's all about.
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I love that.
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Now the bath house.
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I know that when I was out there you had mentioned that you were getting ready to sort of be under construction with it.
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Where are you in the construction of the bath house now?
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I mean like one, one hundredth of the way there.
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Okay.
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Okay, I thought it was going to be done last February.
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So we have the foundation in and we have the septic in, okay, so you're making progress.
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Yeah, it doesn't look awesome, but everything takes way longer than you think.
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My dad told me a long time ago he's like take whatever estimate you get for time and money and just triple.
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And it's very true, but as long as you don't get hung up on the time and the money then, it's going really well, but it'll come together and the bathhouse will be nice because we'll have water and showers.
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We'll have a couple outdoor showers, a couple stalls for folks to use, and so I think we get a lot of potential mountain bikers that are like you know, after you're done mountain biking, it's pretty nice to shower off, so but we did put in a cold plunge and so that's kind of an opportunity to get in and shower off, and that's been.
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That's been good, particularly during the hot summer months.
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And that's a naturally spring, fed cold, plunge right.
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We figured out if you just put like a hose in the creek and then the hose, you know gravity would feed that big, it's one of those big metal, you know feed bins or whatever to get a tractor supply and then the water runs through, which is great.
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So then you get in there and you're getting fresh water all the time, so you don't have to clean it, you know, after every use or whatever.
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That's nice, that's very nice.
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Yeah, we don't.
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We didn't have power, or so it's like all right, well, how are we going to do this?
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And so we have solar in the cabins, solar light, solar battery, we have water filters that you fill up out of the spring.
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That's nearby, and so at first we did that because we had to, and now I really like it.
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I think I'm going to keep the cabin solar and keep the water.
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I mean, it's I don't know, it's kind of a off the grid feeling.
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The tree house will have power and we do have a well up there, so that'll be nice.
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Now the tree house.
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We have to describe this tree house for people that haven't seen tree houses like this before, because this isn't just a tree house that we remember growing up and smacking a few boards against the, you know the tree and hoping it holds up.
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No, this is yeah, this is it.
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We built tree houses growing up and it was that it was like a two by four and then another two by four like get up the tree.
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Yeah, this is like really professionally done.
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If you've ever seen, you know, treehouse masters, like it's.
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It's the real, the real deal.
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There's a platform.
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It's probably 25 feet at the, you know, at the high point, and in the back it's a little bit lower.
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There's a swinging bridge that you enter.
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So you go up the trail, you go up the steps over the swinging bridge and a lot of folks have said like why'd you do a swinging bridge?
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I'm like because swinging bridges are awesome.
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They're awesome.
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It's really cool.
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It's really cool and it's like a really cool way to enter.
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It's all supported by trees, five feet off the ground, sitting on six by sixes.
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Like that's not a treehouse, right, this is a tree house.
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I was like we're doing a real tree house and it may be a crazy idea, like a lot of folks are like, what do you do if the tree's down?
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I was like I don't know, but it's really cool.
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Right now, I always tell him to call future heartwell and he'll figure out.
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there you go, there you go, yeah, we'll see.
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Well, and the interior too we're're talking about, I mean the finishes and, as you mentioned, it's climate controlled.
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You have running water there, bathroom, the whole nine yards.
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So, yeah, I mean this is kind of all the way, kind of back up in the back of the property, so you will still be able to be out there in the middle of kind of feeling like you're in nowhere, but you have all the accoutrements of home.
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I mean this.
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Yeah, it's super private, the guys there right now there's a guy finishing it off for me and he's amazing, he's super good carpenter he's.
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We took we had to cut down a walnut tree and so we build the walnut into these slabs and if you're familiar with walnut, it's beautiful, has this like dark pattern through the middle of it and he's putting those together right now into our countertop and he put the.
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We got some old barn wood that we did above the kitchen, and so it's going to look really cool, but it's going to be really comfortable.
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And my thought is is like the tree house is kind of your high end, all the comforts of home.
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And then we have our open air cabins, which are, you know, they have solar lights, they have a propane stove, they have a bed, and so that's kind of your next rung.
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And then we have the tent camping.
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So if you want to come tent camping, but we'll also have the A-frame too, which will be enclosed, and we'll probably have heat in there too, and soon we'll have a little something for everybody.
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But we have plenty of room to grow and expand and the thought was like let's offer something for everybody and then see what people like you know, originally I thought we would go heavy on the tent camping and we put two sites in and those hadn't been nearly as popular as the cabins.
00:15:45.676 --> 00:15:47.797
So I was like, all right, well, cabins is where it's at.
00:15:47.817 --> 00:15:48.717
So Very cool.
00:15:48.738 --> 00:15:49.197
So we'll see.
00:15:49.197 --> 00:15:54.842
And a year from now, I'd love to talk to you again and see what happened, absolutely, absolutely.
00:15:56.384 --> 00:15:58.549
And there are trails around there too, so we mentioned the waterfall and you have that to hike to.
00:15:58.549 --> 00:16:00.715
But we're not talking about just these little, you know.
00:16:00.715 --> 00:16:04.350
I mean it's not like climbing Mount Mitchell or anything, but I mean it's you can get a workout in.
00:16:04.350 --> 00:16:14.653
And when we were there, I mean you know I remember my wife the whole time going.
00:16:14.653 --> 00:16:15.394
I wore the wrong shoes.
00:16:15.394 --> 00:16:15.936
I wore the wrong shoes.
00:16:15.936 --> 00:16:19.298
I didn't know we were doing this, mike, I'm like, but you can spend a whole day right on property.
00:16:19.659 --> 00:16:26.070
Yeah, and you can also just relax too, like I forget that I love going out and adventuring as hard as possible, but I forget.
00:16:26.070 --> 00:16:30.866
A lot of people like to just relax and so we hung some hammocks over the Creek.
00:16:30.866 --> 00:16:35.047
Um, we did build almost a mile of mountain bike trail so you can mountain bike around the property.
00:16:35.047 --> 00:16:51.177
It's a couple little trail to the waterfall and there's 38 acres, so there's plenty of opportunity to expand and as soon as we get some time, I mean, that's really what I love doing is like building trails and, you know, exploring the woods, and so once we wrap up some of these big projects, that's on my agenda for the winter.
00:16:51.177 --> 00:16:54.596
It's just like walk around and build trails and keep that experience.
00:16:54.596 --> 00:17:02.847
But we also back up to Fallen Creek, the summer camp, and so they have maybe 800 acres of protected land.
00:17:02.847 --> 00:17:06.396
So the 38 acres feels much bigger because you're right next to that big piece of protected land.
00:17:06.396 --> 00:17:07.419
So that's amazing.
00:17:07.599 --> 00:17:08.867
Yeah, how do you reserve it?
00:17:08.867 --> 00:17:11.255
Is it like through Hip Camp or something like that?
00:17:11.684 --> 00:17:33.781
Yeah, we're on Hip Camp, airbnb, vrbo, but we also have our website, so coldspringbasecampcom, and just as, like a starting business owner, I was like I don't know what the best route is, so we kind of put it out on all these places, which I think is smart because we definitely get people from all of those places that I think wouldn't have found us just, you know, through our website or through Instagram or whatever.
00:17:37.845 --> 00:17:39.174
So, how far booked out are you finding yourself these days?
00:17:39.174 --> 00:17:42.449
Well, weekends definitely book up, but then weekdays there's usually plenty of spot.
00:17:42.449 --> 00:17:45.336
So, yeah, you can still find a spot for sure.
00:17:45.336 --> 00:17:54.654
And one thing, particularly during COVID it's kind of chilled a little bit now, but I don't know about you, but during COVID you couldn't get a camp spot anywhere and so.
00:17:54.815 --> 00:18:04.355
I think that was sort of why a lot of these places like our place took off and services like hip camp, which folks aren't familiar with, is kind of the airbnb of camping yeah and it's pretty cool.
00:18:04.394 --> 00:18:09.738
You know, you have a tent site, you can have a cabin, um, and it really services that market, which is cool.
00:18:09.738 --> 00:18:21.959
Yeah, so if you're I know I've used it before when you want to, you know, say you want to go to davidson river campground but it's full for like the next eight months, so you can go on hip camp and find a great place in Brevard or something like that.
00:18:22.179 --> 00:18:26.105
Yeah, and I like what you said earlier about that too, of just sort of getting away from the crowds.
00:18:26.244 --> 00:18:29.855
And I don't know if it's just because of my age, if we've been doing as long as we have.
00:18:29.855 --> 00:18:35.208
But you know, I feel like sometimes I have more seclusion in my backyard than I feel like I have at some of the campsites.
