Get To Know: Buffalo Cove Outdoor Education Center
Jun 22, 2024 10:36AM ● By Randee BrownBorn out of a passion for the land of the Southern Appalachians, Nathan Roark established Buffalo Cove in 2000 to offer outdoor education programs and summer camps.
Roark grew up in downtown Atlanta, and knew at a young age it wasn’t where he wanted to live as an adult. Having attended summer camps in WNC himself, he saw firsthand the power of what summer camps can do while simultaneously falling in love with the forest, ecosystems, and natural history of the region.
As a teen, Roark began assisting a childhood mentor as an outdoor educator. His focus was earth skills, wilderness survival, and strengthening ties to natural resources. As his skills developed, he learned he was holding onto a skillset that was pretty rare, even teaching these as a junior counselor at a Brevard summer camp.
“I saw that this was something so rare and something that is so needed,” Roark said. “We need to hold onto these skills, and we really need to keep these old ways alive.”
In his early 20s, Roark began to feel he needed to seek opportunities to teach these skills to children that don’t have the advantage of attending typically pricey overnight summer camps in the area. With a couple of partners, he was able to raise the funds and start Buffalo Cove, and began offering summer camp to groups of inner-city foster children.
“We would fly kids from the South Florida area to Western North Carolina and spend a week or two weeks developing community and developing skills,” Roark said. “The beauty is that these skills are our human heritage, regardless of the color of your skin or your religion. This is our common ground; where we all came from. What I saw was this magical opportunity to just explore being a human being in a world that was trying to section us off and break us up.”
While many of WNC’s summer camps offer a variety of outdoor activities, Buffalo Cove’s focus is rooted in living closely with the Appalachian Mountains. Attendees participate in fire crafting, woodworking, knife working, breaking rocks to make arrowheads, blacksmithing, basketry, and other bush-crafting and wilderness survival skills. Camp leaders take risk management very seriously, and strive to open doors to how to safely explore situations with potential dangers rather than presenting off-limits scenarios.
“We want the ability to have conversations, and know that there is no possibility of a child being a shadow in the corner,” Roark said. “With our small groups and well-trained counselors, we are able to take our shoes off and walk safely in a creek because we have the numbers to do that safely. Some adults will tell children not to ever touch a knife, but we will say, ‘hey, pick it up, let’s use this’ and we can teach them how to use it in a safe and responsible manner. That’s how we want to approach education.”
For the first six years in operation, Buffalo Cove’s sole clients were children in foster care. Roark said many of these kids had never left their neighborhood before, and arriving at Buffalo Cove was “about as foreign as they could imagine.” While some shared some fear, uncertainty, and distrust upon arrival, after a few days to a week, campers would express they felt safer than they ever had before.
“This is the transformation of what it means to be a part of a meaningful community,” Roark said. “We’re all out here and we’re all accountable to each other. We’re learning skills and interacting in real human ways. No one is trying to put on a façade. We’ve created the environment where everyone feels they fit in; they felt the trust, the warmth, and the realness, and that transformation was magical.”
As funding became challenging to acquire, Roark and his partners realized they needed to branch out to keep the camp program available to foster kids. In addition to summer camps, Buffalo Cove offers a calendar of custom-designed educational experiences for some charter schools in the Boone area and a community school in Brevard. Lessons with Buffalo Cove fill the Outdoor Education component of these schools’ curriculum, and students grow with the programs that complement what is being studied in the classroom.
Summer camp programs are also offered to the public, though Buffalo Cove still prioritizes its mission to serve foster children. Money raised through donations, fundraising, and some of the profits from other programs continues to support those coming from disadvantaged situations.
“We are learning lessons about the history of our area, about certain plants and animals, and hard skill sets, but more than that, we are fostering a deeper connection with the natural world that creates appreciation and love,” Roark said. “We are able to send kids off that not only feel safe and confident in the woods, they also have an appreciation of the outdoors. They have created a foundation of teamwork, and we hope they take those lessons and put them into real-world applications, which I think is really special.”
Buffalo Cove Outdoor Education Center offers education workshops, adventure experiences, and summer camp programs. Learn more at BuffaloCove.com.