This summer we again welcome back both the Jasper Quartet and the Enso Quartet. Inessa Zaretsky and Paul Nitsch will be back on the piano and the usual complement of wind players will be back with a host of other wind players for a spectacular last concert.

The concert series is FREE for students with discounted tickets for staff and faculty. Performances are every Tuesdayat 7:30 in Kittredge theater.

Email chamber@warren-wilson.edu for more information.

This article is part of The Story Behind, a regular series that features extraordinary photos from Warren Wilson life. (Click here to see more.)

From left: Lizzie Haworth, Jonathan Pierce, and Wesley Hufstader are watched over by the truck’s creepy baby-doll mascot.

Warren Wilson’s Auto Shop Crew has turned a hulking piece of junk into an electric vehicle that can serve the college for years to come.

Using grant money from the N.C. Clean Air Coalition and working under the direction of Jonathan Unger, crew supervisor this past year, the 12-student crew converted a 1.25-ton diesel truck into a zero-emission, electric short-haul carrier that the Carpentry Crew will use to transport lumber and other heavy material and equipment.

“It’s all about being sustainable,” said crew member Lizzie Haworth, a psychology major from Lynnwood, Wash.

Sustainable, yes; easy, no. The truck, a retired CUCV military support vehicle, hadn’t run in a while. Its last owner, the Forestry Crew, needed starting fluid to get it to turn over. The coolant tank was a Gatorade bottle. The truck finally wheezed to a stop and was stored, taking up space, when Unger targeted it for conversion.

In fall semester 2012, Unger and the crew pulled the diesel motor, the truck’s heavy transmission and its 30-gallon gas tank. They bought 12 heavy-duty 8-volt batteries and mounted them on an old TV stand and built the battery box from an old dolly. They made mounting plates from scrap iron lying around the shop and built the new chain-driven transmission, aligning it perfectly with the transfer case so that there is no undue wear on the parts.

Jonathan Pierce, a psychology major from Greer, S.C., did most of the wiring. Wesley Hufstader, an art major from New York City, built many of the plates. Both were in the shop with Haworth recently, explaining their work while underneath the truck on a lift. There was a definite “this is so cool” excitement in what they’d done, despite the difficulties involved.

“We had a lot of problems,” Haworth said. “It was one of ‘those’ vehicles.”

And they had a self-imposed deadline: the annual Work Parade on campus. The day before, with everything seemingly in place, they stood around the truck – nearly everyone holding a fire extinguisher – and cranked it up. It turned over, the students cheered, people piled into the bed and they drove up the hill from the shop, where it promptly died. The batteries weren’t fully charged, and Unger had left the emergency brake on.

But on parade day, the crew was ready. They strung Christmas lights (powered by the batteries, of course) around the truck and dressed up like Orcs, from “The Hobbit.”

Wesley Hufstader at the wheel.

“We looked like crazy Scottish people,” Hufstader said.
The truck performed admirably, carrying a bed load of Orcs around campus and coasting downhill to recharge its batteries. And it wouldn’t need an auxiliary charge for weeks.

“Now it’s the best ever,” Haworth said of the truck. “You can’t get more sustainable than this.”

Read more Story Behinds!

Here is WWC Forestry Manager and Timbersports coach Shawn Swartz’s report from the national championship:

Thanks for all of the support you’ve shown Caleb for the Timbersports National Championship. He came in 6th place, and we are delighted that we had the 6th best collegiate lumberjack in the nation in our program’s inaugural year. It has truly been a Cinderella season. We have learned much about the equipment necessary to be successful and have been gathering invaluable training tips so that we can hit it hard when we resume in the fall. We are uncertain how much airtime Caleb will get, but the event should air on the ESPN Outdoor Channel on Sunday, June 16. Thanks to those of you who made the drive to cheer for Caleb and for the support of the WWC Timbersports Team.

Caleb just before the standing block event

On April 27, Warren Wilson College inaugurated its seventh president, Steven L. Solnick, on Sunderland Lawn just before a heavy rain settled in. Exactly three weeks later, on May 18, there was no such luck with the elements; the 2013 Commencement had to be moved across the road to DeVries Gymnasium because of a persistent morning rain. But the quickly coordinated efforts of many people both inside and outside the gym somehow made the last-minute location work.

Of course, there’s at least a slight upside to nearly every shift in plans. As the College’s minister, the Rev. Steve Runholt, observed just before delivering the invocation, the Commencement location had been moved from lovely Sunderland Lawn to the hardwood home of the 2013 men’s basketball national champions. And, yes, the banner recognizing the Owls’ USCAA Division II title hangs on the wall the Commencement audience was facing.

But as always, the stars of the Commencement show were the nearly 200 bachelor’s degree recipients who had earned B.A. and B.S. degrees. The graduating class was Warren Wilson’s 45th as a four-year college.

Speaking of graduates, one of the College’s many distinguished MFA Program for Writers alumni, N.C. Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti, delivered an engaging main address. The text of his speech can be found below. You also can view his address online and see photos here.

This year’s graduating senior top honors went to Courtney Newsome, Pfaff Cup winner, and Felicia Hall, Sullivan Award recipient. Barnaby Ohrstrom was chosen by his classmates to be senior class speaker. Top teaching awards went to Laura Vance (faculty), professor of sociology and gender/women’s studies, and to Stan Cross (staff) of the College’s Environmental Leadership Center.

Here is the full text of Joseph Bathanti’s Commencement address:

Thank you for that gracious introduction, President Solnick.

Good Morning: Members of the platform party; Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the College, Paula Garrett; Vice Presidents Blomgren and Ehrlich; Deans Kramer, Perrine and Robertson; Reverends Runholt and Ammons; Chair of Warren Wilson Board of Trustees, Alice Buhl, as well as other members of the Board of Trustees; Dr. Kehrberg; Mr. Bailey; Mr. Ohrstrom; Mr. Hays; President Emeritus Orr; distinguished Warren Wilson faculty, parents, family and friends, students and soon-to-be-graduates.

It is my great honor to be here with you today and also my honor to claim Warren Wilson as my alma mater. I graduated in poetry from the MFA program in Creative Writing in 1991, consistently rated the number one low residency MFA in America, though I cannot take credit for that, but I think you should. Though the MFA program convenes on this campus at times of the year when, by and large, the student body is absent, your spirit, even in your absence, invests every molecule of Warren Wilson. Certain places, certain plots of geography, possess a vibration and we’re sitting here this morning on one of those sacred tracts. It is additionally significant to point out that just next door, a touch over 6 miles away, is the site of legendary Black Mountain College – founded in 1933 by a band of disgruntled academic dissidents – that remains to this this day the greatest experimental academic adventure ever launched on American soil. During its shimmering stormy 23 year history, many of the nation’s greatest thinkers and artists were in residence or paid visits at Black Mountain: “It was” – as Martin Duberman points out in his history of Black Mountain – the forerunner and exemplar of much that is currently considered innovative in art, education and lifestyle.” In many ways, Warren Wilson has donned over the years Black Mountain College’s lofty banner.

I hope you’ll indulge me if I read a poem. However, please do not rush the platform and drag me off to tar and feathers when I announce it’s Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” a poem all-too-often brandished, since its initial 1916 publication, as a having an indisputably formulaic fixed moral, especially for gleaming new college graduates – and I’m sure it’s all-too-often read, for all the wrong reasons, at momentous occasions like this one. The Cambridge History of American Literature hails “The Road Not Taken” as … “a chestnut of high school teachers of American Literature and a frequent citation on greeting cards of rugged American sentiment. All in all, a veritable American adage, a pithy concentration of our proudest wisdom of self-reliance from Emerson to John Wayne: the very idiom of American desire.”

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The road of course and its inevitable crossroads is a well-worn metaphor, cliché even, hackneyed and overused. Everyone weighs in on it – even Yogi Berra, with his inscrutable Zen-like pronouncement: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” I am not suggesting we discard this metaphor. It remains significant, useful, and I wouldn’t want for a moment to diminish the magnitude of this day.

In Frost’s famous poem, its speaker comes to that nexus where “two roads [diverge].” He pauses, ponders, then chooses presumably the correct path, “the one less travelled by,” the one that ends up “[making] all the difference.” I’ve taught this poem a hundred times and I’ve always been troubled by its closure. Again, the poem is often held up as a tiny parable of Emersonian self-reliance that embodies the American spirit of adventure and indomitability. If you have the good sense to choose the proper road, it will make “all the difference.” But Frost does not go on to explain what “all the difference” is. Is “difference” in this sense good (that’s what we’re led to believe, what our teachers have led us to believe) or is it bad?

The poem is titled “The Road Not Taken” – not the “The Road Taken.” The speaker is “telling this with a sigh.” In the poem’s final stanza, he broods over the path he neglected to follow, rather than abiding in the fulfillment of the path he did follow. He is not happy –though, like many of us, he’s become an expert at rationalization. Jay Parini, Frost biographer, suggests “ … Frost … is saying … : ‘When I am old, like all old men, I shall make a myth of my life. I shall pretend, as we all do, that I took the less traveled road. But I shall be lying.’”

This poem is not about making the right move; it traffics ultimately in complacent regret. It’s a cagey little cautionary tale laced with Frost’s deft, yet iron-clad, irony. Literary critic Frank Lentricchia says “The Road Not Taken” “might actually be the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Frost himself admonished: “You have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem – very tricky.”

You all are poised today at one of those mythic crossroads, one perhaps the culture makes too much of, one I remember standing at myself, the same one I circle back to again and again. When I finally left college and my home town of Pittsburgh with a Master’s Degree in English Literature, a most dubious credential back in 1976, I trekked to North Carolina to work in a prison as a VISTA Volunteer. As I murkily recall, I had no intentions of saving the world. I did not necessarily see myself as a do-gooder, even though I wanted to do good. In fact, my first geographical choice for a VISTA assignment was Montana simply because Montana struck me as grand and otherworldly. Period. Also I opted for a year in VISTA instead of two years in the Peace Corps because I knew I could stand anything for a year, if my assignment – even doing good – proved unbearable. However, because I fit the generalist rubric – meaning that unlike plumbers, electricians, physicians, etc., I had no specific skill in anything – I fetched an assignment at Huntersville Prison, in deep country, twelve miles north of Charlotte.

I had applied to VISTA not because I knew what I wanted to do, but because the list of what I couldn’t stomach doing was so ponderously long. I had never gotten over reading, as a 16-year-old high school junior, Albert Camus’s perfect little essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in which he cautions that the Gods “had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.” Smoldering in me, as well, was the desire to leave home. Not because I felt trapped or nursed a grudge against it – on the contrary – but because I was sure that leaving was the right thing you do. Had I been rejected by VISTA, I planned to buy a Harley, throttle it cross-country to California, sell it there in the Golden State for a grubstake and see what happened. To complicate matters, I had decided, by the summer of ’76, I wanted to be a writer. But of course I hadn’t known what that entailed, how you arranged to be one. Nevertheless, I had fabricated for myself, at least internally, an identity as writer; and, like John Paul Sartre, I pretended to be a writer until I became one – which has been my strategy in most areas of life.

More than anything, I wanted to read. I wanted someone to pay me to do this – to remunerate me for simply sitting around and reading. That was the position I was waiting to be offered.

I don’t want to say I landed here on this platform by accident, though that might sum up perfectly for many, especially my early teachers, the nuns, this unlikely occurrence. I suppose I prefer to call it willed serendipity. Perhaps grace is a better word. Something I know for absolutely sure is that we arrive nowhere of any consequence without the help of countless others. You are prime examples, surrounded as you are by those who love you most, including many of your teachers, and many more, not here, invisible, anonymous.

Happenstance – call it random – does play an unfathomable role in destiny, and in career. Lentricchia also observes, in relationship to “The Road Not Taken,” that “our life-shaping choices are irrational, … we are fundamentally out of control.” Hearing that, you all, pondering this way or that, will not be comforted – nor will your parents, though they understand perfectly the wiles of random. But, remember, you now possess a genuine credential that can never be wrested from you: a college degree from a fine college that should never be taken for granted, that stands you in good stead intellectually, is the prime engine for your creature comforts and, who knows, maybe even wealth and notoriety.

The crossroads will become for you a ubiquitous reality – not just trope or metaphor or even cliché, though for many of us the metaphor of the road remains pervasive and predictably literal. These crossroads are not cause for hand-wringing, but exhilaration. Jaqueline Barbra writes: “The road is an instrument of entry and escape … a winding foreground for drama … This is the great promise of the road: the quick turn that affords you an unexpected view and, with it, a new perspective.”

I’m here to tell you, and I’d wager your parents and grandparents and teachers would corroborate this, that Frost knew what he was talking about when he wrote: “Yet knowing how way leads on to way / I doubted if I should ever come back.” Way does, inevitably, lead on to way. Roads lead into other roads – on and on exponentially. The circumnavigation is dizzying. Often you do not “come back.” Says Mark Richardson, another Frost critic. “We realize our destination only when we arrive at it …”

What does it mean to be changed – not trained or harnessed, as if the wondrous road unwinding is already fixed, akin to predestination – but to literally be changes, transformed? Schools like Warren Wilson “bestow” – what Loren Pope, in Colleges That Change Lives, calls – “benefactions to mind and soul …. Not only are [those schools] better, but they want you, and you will love them for making a new and better you. Your satisfaction will be life-long.”

You have loved this place, not merely in the anecdotal, rhetorical fashion we say we love something, but the way one loves her mother or best beloved or even God. And you have felt loved by Warren Wilson. And it is that love, I’ll attest, that comes out in very palpable ways when I encounter Warren Wilson graduates. They were changed, transformed, while here – the recipients of “benefactions to mind and soul.” It was not just a college, but a cathedral, a holy place. Not only have they, like you, been educated, but evangelized. You chose this college, and it chose you, for a reason. Now, as you take to the road – farm roads, two tracks, urban and international, streets and boulevards, alleys and avenues, and most importantly that sublime road that leads straight from the heart and soul into one’s joyous life’s work – those reasons will be made dramatically manifest.

By virtue of having walked on this campus, you now possess a creed more powerful than paper and ink, something very mysterious, even sacramental, that embodies this place, what few graduates, I think, even from the most vaunted institutions across our great nation, possess. It can only be love, ultimately, that perpetuates places like Warren Wilson.

While I never returned to live in Pittsburgh, I am permitted entry into my hometown regularly, and I return to it habitually in my imagination – not to mention that I’ve written incessantly about it, lo, these 36 years living here in North Carolina. My random assignment as a VISTA Volunteer truly “has made all the difference.” In truth, one never leaves home.

So, as you pause at the crossroads, pondering what next, what you must avoid, at all costs, is the kind of regret, second-guessing, and self-recrimination, even bitterness – “telling this [or that] with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence” – that beats ever so subtly just beneath the deceptively brilliant lines of Robert Frost’s little poem. You are, at this moment, this carpe diem moment, in the advantageous position, this moment of truth, if you will – and there will be more of them, I promise – to strike out on something bold.

But tarry a little longer in contemplation. Weigh the risk involved with doing the predictable – or even the unpredictable. Your station in life, at this moment affords you that opportunity – while you are young, blessedly so, when hubris and benign ignorance are not so lethal as they’ll become as you age. I urge you to act not on whim, but conviction; to unite in reconciliation rather than suspicion or xenophobia; to move forward in the spirit of cooperation and charity. The future of the planet depends upon our threshold to embrace and adapt to difference. Way will inevitably lead onto way.

Philosopher and theologian Thomas Moore stresses that “deep changes in life follow movements in imagination.” Einstein takes it a step further: “Imagination is more important than knowledge … Imagination encircles the world.” And Keats: “I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of the Imagination.” You must remain imaginative, wildly so. Travel, read books, see films, go to museums and zoos, be kind to children and animals and the aged, remain intellectually precocious, fall madly in love, care for the planet. Above all, have faith, dream prodigiously and leaven every bit of it with a social conscience and compassion for those less fortunate than you. The poor will always be with us. Compassion does not cost a dime.

And please keep sacred your stories. Words fail us all the time; but, nevertheless, as Samuel Beckett reminds us, “Words are all we have.” Without poetry, without all the arts, how would we as a species ever gauge how we very deeply and honestly feel? Would we even know how we feel? Apart from the pure enjoyment and edification they impart, The Arts and Humanities reorder and discipline our instincts in profoundly human and humane ways. They assure us we have hearts and souls, and dispense enduring advice on how to keep the two from sundering.

Read more Story Behinds!
Finally, in the words of the great American poet William Carlos Williams – a contemporary of Frost’s: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die every day / for lack / of what is found / there.”

Prospective students will be able to meet faculty, staff and current students; tour the campus; learn more about the academic program, the Warren Wilson College Triad and financial aid; and have an admission interview. Open House visitors also are invited to enjoy lunch as guests of the college.

For more information or to make reservations, call the admission office at 828-771-2021 or 800-934-3536, or e-mail visit@warren-wilson.edu. You also can register online by clicking here.

Everyone is invited to attend these free readings and lectures in fiction and poetry. The complete schedule, subject to change, can be found here.

1. Never feed a bear. Do not leave cat food outside. Most black bears will avoid people, except bears that have learned to associate food with people. Ninety percent of all human/bear conflicts have been associated with habituated, food-conditioned bears. A fed bear is a dead bear. Fed individuals become pests that will either be hit by a car or shot to protect the people.

2. Never leave garbage or compost uncovered. Secure all garbage in sturdy containers with tight fitting lids. Take in bird feeders (especially suet) until the cold months. Do not clean fish outside of houses. Do not put garbage out until the morning of pick up.

3. Never approach a bear, especially bear cubs. When surprised or when protecting cubs, a black bear will threaten the intruder by laying back its ears, uttering a series of huffs, chopping its jaws, and stamping its feet. This may be followed by a charge, but in most instances it is only a bluff. Keep a distance of at least 100 yards between you and bears. When encountering a bear, leave the area and give the bear the right-of-way. Always leave the animal an escape route.

4. Be alert when hiking in bear territory. To avoid bear encounters, hike in groups, carry noisemakers such as rocks in an empty can, or shuffle your feet in dry leaves to make noise. Noisemakers may not be effective in dense brush or near rushing water. Be especially alert when traveling into the wind because bears may not pick up your scent. Avoid food sources such as berry patches and carcass remains. Watch for bear sign – fresh tracks, digging, and scat (droppings). If you encounter these signs or see a bear at a distance, make a wide detour. Pepper spray only works within 30 feet or closer and may antagonize a bear as much as deter it.

5. At close range keep calm and assess the situation. A bear rearing on its hind legs is not always aggressive. If it moves its head from side to side, it may only be trying to pick up scent and focus its small eyes. Speak in low tones and back away slowly. Do not run. Most bears can run as fast as a racehorse. Quick jerky movements by humans can trigger an attack. Climbing a tree is no assurance of safety because black bears climb well.

6. If you are charged, attempt to stand your ground. Black bears may be frightened off by acting aggressively toward the animal. Do not play dead if a black bear is stalking you or considers you as prey. Use sticks, rocks, frying pans, or whatever is available to frighten the animal away, but do not hassle a bear unnecessarily with noise because this may trigger an attack.

7. As a last resort in the event of bear attack, resistance is usually useless, but a few victims have survived by striking an attacking bear directly in the nose. Bears are an important part of the ecosystem and are worthy of continued protection. For many people, seeing a bear is very exciting and they would not want to eradicate them from our campus. Our campus community is dedicated to the protection of all wildlife, with full regard given to public safety. With your co-operation, bears and people can co-exist, but only if bears are respected as potentially dangerous wild animals, and people act responsibly for their own safety and the safety of others. Problem bears are not born, they are created.

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Saturday, May 25
Rooted In the Community Service Garden – Warren Wilson College
9:00 AM – Noon every Saturday
Volunteers needed to help with planting, laying weed cloth, digging and pulling weeds.
You must sign up at the Service Program Office (Ransom House) in order for your service hours to be approved.
So stop on by and sign up soon!

Wednesday, May 29
At MANNA Food Bank
10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
4-6 volunteers needed to team up with RiverLink and remove invasive plants along the riverbank behind MANNA Food Bank.
(Transportation will be provided to students with a WWC campus drivers license. Only 7 seats available, so sign up now! Contact the Service Program Office, (828) 771-3065)

Friday, June 7
Children First/CIS FOOD DRIVE – Sponsored by WLOS
Choose your team and choose a shift! Teams of three will work the best
Location: Carolina Furniture Concepts store in Arden (2617 Hendersonville Road)
Available shifts: 8AM – 11AM, 10:45 AM – 2PM, 1:45 PM – 5PM, and 4:45PM – 8PM

Saturday, June 8
Rooted In the Community Service Garden – Warren Wilson College
9:00 AM – Noon every Saturday
Volunteers needed to help with planting, laying weed cloth, digging and pulling weeds.
To sign up, contact: The Service Program Office, (828) 771-3065

Saturday, June 8
NC Outward Bounds School’s River Bound Race Series 2013 (5k & 15k)
At Warren Wilson College Trails!
Volunteers needed to help with set-up, break-down, handing out water at aid stations and more.
To volunteer, contact Nicole Fava, nfava@ncobs.org or (828) 239-2121

June 17 – August 6
Summer Food Service Program at 1st Presbyterian of Swannanoa (near Warren Wilson College)
This meal program is sponsored by the Buncombe County Schools, to help bridge the nutrition gap during the summer months when children are no longer enrolled in school, and is free for children ages 2-18 in Buncombe County
11:45 AM to 1:00 PM daily beginning June 17th
Training session will take place on June 4th at Owen High School at 5:30 – 6:30 PM
To volunteer, contact Karen Kyle at the Service Program Office, (828) 771-3065

The grant, spanning a three-year period, will foster a close partnership between Warren Wilson and The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design (CCCD). The collaboration will provide a sustainable home for craft education in the region that will be open to students across the nation.

Grant funding initially will provide for increased faculty and staff positions, including a full-time teaching position in sculpture and greater support for woodworking, fiber arts and blacksmithing so that they continue to flourish at Warren Wilson. In addition to increased faculty support and artist-in-residence positions in each of the three areas, internships for recent graduates will be phased in at the college during the grant period. The Windgate grant also will enable the creation of a new staff position in order to coordinate the partnership with CCCD.

“This is an excellent opportunity to enhance an existing strength of the college,” President Solnick said. “We already collaborate with CCCD, and we look forward to doing so more formally and to working with other schools and programs in the area to support the role of craft in our region.”

CCCD Board Chair Michael Sherrill agrees: “For the past two years, the center and Warren Wilson have based our discussions on developing a model craft program – for faculty and students in the region, as well as for others around the country who are interested in sustaining craft culture. We look forward to making this vision a reality.”

Warren Wilson has long had a tradition of Appalachian crafts on campus. The college had, however, seen a decline in student interest until 2009, when interest reemerged in several areas and the college created student work crews with an eye toward reviving the tradition of fine craftwork on campus. Currently the crews include fiber arts, blacksmithing and fine woodworking. The Windgate grant will allow Warren Wilson to dramatically increase its craft outreach to the greater community and its artisans, collaborating with CCCD to reach many of the center’s goals, as well.

“This grant provides a unique opportunity for the college to take a leading role in the teaching of craft and forges an important partnership with the center,” said Stephanie Moore, CCCD executive director. “Students will be engaged in learning a significant art form that helped build the economy of our region and changed so many lives.

“Warren Wilson is an extraordinary treasure in the Southeast, and we look forward to working with both the students and faculty to develop a top-notch craft studies program.”

May 20-24 – open 8:30 to 4:30 (Tuesday, May 21, the library closes at 3 p.m.)

May 27 – closed for Memorial Day

May 28-31 – open 8:30 to 4:30

June 3-7 – open 8:30 to 4:30

Summer school hours will be announced soon.

Pool
On Friday, May 17, the pool hours are 7 a.m. – 1 p.m. Closed Saturday and Sunday. Summer hours begin Monday, May 20.

Summer Hours: Weekdays: 8 a.m. – 2 p.m. and 4-6 p.m.

Closed all weekends, Memorial Day and July 4th.

Pool phone # 828.299.7149 (rings on pool deck & takes no messages). For updates or questions about membership, call Andrew Pulsifer, Director of Aquatics, at 828.771.3005

DeVries Gym
Closes May 17 at 5 p.m.  Reopens May 20.

Summer Hours: 8am – 8pm, Monday- Friday;  closed weekends