Yurts for WNC Hurricane Helene Survivors, Local Craft Effort

WNC's continued recovery efforts need your support. As a family-owned-business in Asheville, we are building a fleet of our Premier Model Yurts directly for Hurricane Helene Survivors. We can keep our friends safe, sheltered and secure. We believe in offering dignified, authentic structures to our kindreds. Every One of our Regional Yurts Survived Helene! and we trust them to serve as intermediary shelters during the rebuilding process. With your help, $72,000+ can build a Fleet of 6+ Yurts - to be installed in the Spring and Summer of 2025.

Visit us at Pisgah Yurt Craft to learn more about who we are!

Our Mongolian-inspired Yurts seamlessly blend traditional wisdom with modern innovation. Recipients will receive our Premier Four-Season Insulated Yurt Package : with all-inclusive platform, delivery, and installation to keep things most easeful and efficient - basically a complete, ready-to-use system that can be pitched nearly anywhere!

What makes our Yurts different than other relief shelters is their heart and tradition. We believe in offering survivors the dignity of authentic and hand-built homes. We aren’t skimping on any of our Premier Features. Our business ethos is centered on quality, sustainability, and care – and we extend these virtues unto these gifts to our friends and neighbors. Our frames can last a lifetime, and our fabrics will happily serve for over a decade with good care. We hope they will enliven the wounded heart and keep a warmth running for years to come.

These Yurts will be accessible via Scholarship Application, hosted on our Website. Our goal is to offer them from 1/2 off to Entirely Free. Need and financial capacity will be assessed by our team, on a case-by-case basis. Personal interviews and thorough site visits will be conducted to ensure your donor funds are well applied and that we may serve to our highest capacities.

While Hurricane Helene rumbled through WNC almost 3 months ago, the devastating wake continues for so many. Driving down the road, we still see the remnants of houses torn from their foundations by landslides or cast half-way up trees by river water, box trucks and sheds crumpled beside the roads, the creeks carved by new courses of roaring waters. Generational homes washed away, families displaced, and businesses reduced to soggy rubble... this will be the continued reality for a long while yet, and Pisgah Yurt Craft is uniquely prepared to help the rebuild!

Survivors are bracing for the cold season and taking a winter pause on repairs – we will ensure folks have safe and stable shelters for the work yet to come. We've seen the strength and fortitude of our kindreds tent-camping on their land while they tend to what is left of their homes or digging deep through mud to salvage what they can of destroyed businesses and lost wares. The next months and years will require comfortable intermediary shelters to safely see the through.

Pisgah Yurt Craft is a local, family-owned-business. Every one of our employees and regional suppliers have been affected. Your contributions will support a wide network of economic perseverance. We are uniquely equipped to provide resilient and restful sanctuaries for the rebuilding efforts - serving as housing, construction shelters, community spaces, workshop centers...

We have so many displaced friends that want to stay where their home and hearth is - on their own land and within their own community. We can help keep them here.

We are partnering with local co-endorsers

for application review and project distribution.

Sara Legatski of HoneyPot Vintage - Asheville, NC - Local Business Owner and Grassroots Relief Organizer.

Tefa Hallock of WaterHeart - Sweeten Creek, NC - Watershed Educator and Disaster Relief Dispatch at Project Mama Bear.

Funds will be directly applied towards material procurement, employee wages, site preparations, and installation costs. You will be supporting our small team's continued living wages and security here in the Asheville area. Our sewing studio was in ground zero of Beetree Creek's washout in Swannanoa, so we have a proximal and personal lense on troubleshooting the way forward. Most of our lumber comes from local family-operated mills, and even our fabrics are woven right here in North Carolina. Your contributions will support a wide network of economic resilience.

A brief of what we've been through : The wake of Hurricane Helene is truly once-in-a-lifetime for our people, recognized as a 5,000-year flooding/geological event. Nobody prepares for such a storm in these mountains. Our modern way of life, art, and commerce were swept away in less than 12 hours.

60-85 mph winds. 24ft river crests. 1,800 landslides. 26,000 homes affected. $56 billion in damage.

We have been heartbroken to see our neighbors suffer such immense losses, and reverently shaken to witness the landscape so changed.

Our Contribution : PYC will offer these Yurts to individuals, small businesses, and community organizations who have

a) experienced direct losses of shelter,

b) have lost a structure of economic commerce, or

c) need spaces for community forum and organization.

This could look like someone whose generational home was severely damaged by fallen trees and needs a safe basecamp to operate out of as they rebuild their 100-year-old heritage structure. or a quiet homesteader whose self-built cabin was torn from its foundations by a landslide. or a riverside retreat that lost their lodging and source of income. or a small mountain community that needs gathering spaces for continued resource sharing and meetups. We are oriented to serve these purposes and many more.

Recap, Details and Numbers :

Each 16’ Premier Yurt and Platform Package is valued at $24,000

We will offer these from ½ off to entirely free, through a scholarship application hosted on our website. Our small fleet of yurts won't be the solution for everyone - but we have many community members and personal friends who would be blessed by this boost to their continued service and stability.

The Premier 16' Yurt Package :

More about Yurts :

These portable, round structures have been used for centuries across Central Asia as a durable and adaptable home. Yurts offer not only shelter, but a sense of stability, warmth, and togetherness that families and communities urgently need. Constructed from sustainable materials and designed to withstand a wide range of weather conditions, yurts offer an immediate yet enduring answer for displaced families seeking comfort and safety while they rebuild.

They are 4-season livable, unique in their heritage and geometric harmonics, and make a memorable nest for rest and repair. The soul knows something is alive in each of our yurts - they are stand-alone in quality and unmatched in their care. We are so proud to know that each of our regional Yurts tenaciously survived Helene.

We at Pisgah Yurt Craft make the only traditionally framed yurts on the American Continents! With 8 years of design cultivation and craft development, we are equally traditionalists as we are inventors. The old ways make sense - and modern materials allow for some creative problem solving. We strive to maintain the integrity of these unique structural typologies, with reverence and some space for innovation - a synergy of time and place, perfectly sited in the round.

If we exceed our goal, we have a broader scope plan on standby to continue serving our WNC community as needed. We have a reserve package schema that can meet a wider range of needs, including : 6x 16’ diameter, 2x 20’ diameter, and 1x 24’ diameter. If you put your belief and support behind our project, we will happily work through all of 2025 to place as many yurts where they are meant to be!

Keep an eye out for updates as this project evolves, we'll share as much of the process and beneficiaries as we can below!

Pisgah Yurt Craft is overseen by Dreamwood, LLC

and Directed by Lyca Mikhael.

Dreamwood, LLC brings the Imagined into Reality – cultivating the vision into form with creativity, discipline, and reverence.

We are located in Asheville, North Carolina, in operation since 2016

Visit our website to Learn More, Contribute your Time and Efforts, or Apply for Scholarship. We have phone and email contact listed.

Lyca is an Architectural Designer, Old Ways Crafter, and Conveyor of Human Experience. His time at Cornell University fostered deep foundations in Architecture, Sculpture, Furniture Design, Woodworking, Wilderness and Landscape Ecology, Mythos and Cultural Anthropology. Lived-in experiences in off-grid homesteading, primitive lifeways, and self-built shelters through Upstate New York winters and Southern Appalachia summers have taught a great diversity of skills and respect for living close to the seasons and environment. He has been building yurts for 8 years – an endeavor intent on preserving the universal magic of these structures and giving them fresh breath as the only of their kind on the American Continents.

Image Credits : ditchwitch on Instagram, Meteorologist Vernon Turner of WNC Times, Pisgah Yurt Craft of Dreamwood, LLC