We visited Black Mountain as part of our Thanksgiving Mountains loop in November 2025. Read about our previous visits in November 2023 here, and May 2024 here.

From Hendersonville, it was an easy 35-minute interstate drive through Asheville to Black Mountain. As we passed our familiar Asheville exits, we decided to drop off the trailer at our Black Mountain campground and drive the fifteen minutes back to Asheville for a couple hours. So we got our Asheville fix after all!

We were glad to return to Black Mountain and see it thriving post-Hurricane Helene.

Campground

This was our first visit to the newly-reopened Asheville East KOA since the flooding of the bordering Swannanoa River during Hurricane Helene completely destroyed it last fall. They impressively rebuilt from the ground up, and currently have the front side of the campground open and will rebuild the side we’d stayed on previously near the (not-yet repaired) lake over time.

Activities

Our day’s activities were all over the place, so I’m not going to try to break this post into the usual eating/drinking/hiking categories.

After setting up the Airstream in Black Mountain, we drove back to Asheville for lunch at our favorite breakfast spot, Ultra Coffeebar. We love their Sunrise Bagel, no matter the time of day.

Our second agenda item: pick up Botiwalla salads for the drive home to VA the next day. The best.

Last activity in Asheville was gallery hopping around downtown. We hit our usuals, Blue Spiral 1, Momentum, and K2 Studio. Reminder to future selves: driving into downtown Asheville on a pleasant weekend afternoon is a bad idea.

Then it was back to Black Mountain to begin our evening. First off, a drink at new-to-us Old Town District. It’s a cool spot with a funky indoor bar and a secondary bar in the backyard.

From there we headed to Lookout Brewing, a favorite from previous visits. The beers were tasty, the Irish music duo was excellent, and the onion rings were super!

On the way home, we stopped at Peri Social House. It had caught our eye on the drive in: is it a hotel? a restaurant? a bar? Yes. It’s a lovely six-room hotel with a very cute Christmas-themed bar (at least, it was Christmassy in November) and a maybe-permanent pizza truck outside. The decor was fab and the veg pizza we bought on impulse was incredible.

In the morning, we grabbed morning coffee and read the paper at Dripolator before leaving town. It’s clearly a Black Mountain favorite.

To do

Things we’d noted in our research but didn’t get to this visit:

• Hike/walk this greenway/multiuse trail close to downtown
• Consider Beradu Market for breakfast or lunch
• Finally go to Terra Nova Brewing in Swannanoa… oh no, they’ve closed!
• (while we’re talking about closures, note that The Railyard closed in 2024)

And that wraps up our Thanksgiving Mountains loop! Can’t wait for the next trip!