A few miles north of downtown Asheville, heavy machinery now sits in the middle of the French Broad River.
Concrete forms rise from exposed bedrock. Circular walls of rock and steel push the river aside. Locals stop on bridges to stare at what looks, at first glance, like a strange industrial accident.
It is actually one of the most ambitious river surfing projects ever attempted on the East Coast of the United States.
The feature is called Taylor's Wave, a human-made standing wave under construction in Woodfin that is expected to draw kayakers, river surfers, boogie boarders, and freestyle paddlers from across the country.
The project has been in development for nearly a decade.
Engineers have modeled it in a Prague hydraulics laboratory. Environmental consultants studied fish migration routes and flood elevations. Local officials rebuilt park plans around it.
The wave itself is being shaped directly into one of the oldest rivers on Earth.
The goal is simple enough to explain: to create a surfable standing wave in a river that flows year-round.
However, the execution has been anything but simple. Let's learn more about this unique whitewater wave.
A river wide enough to matter
The French Broad is an unusual river for this kind of project. It is broad, deep, and relatively steady through the seasons.
Most rivers in the Southern Appalachians are either too shallow, too steep, or too inconsistent to support a permanent surfable wave.
Back in 2016, longtime paddler Marc Hunt and Olympic kayaker Scott Shipley floated stretches of the river looking for a possible location.
Shipley, founder of the Colorado-based engineering firm S2O Design and Engineering, immediately recognized the potential of the Woodfin site.
The river had enough gradient to create a drop.
Flows remained reliable through much of the year, and existing park access sat nearby.
One other thing caught their attention, though: a large landfill pressed against the riverbank.
That landfill turned out to be one of the reasons the project became possible. Adding a structure to a river can raise upstream flood levels.
Engineers realized that removing part of the old landfill could offset some of the hydraulic impact created by the wave itself.
It also solved an environmental problem, as floodplains and landfills rarely coexist peacefully over the long term.
The Town of Woodfin embraced the idea and eventually folded Taylor's Wave into the much larger Woodfin Greenway and Blueway project, a riverfront redevelopment effort now valued at roughly $30 million to $34 million.
The broader plan includes greenways, beaches, river access points, expanded park space, habitat restoration, and public gathering areas.
Construction contracts for Taylor's Wave were signed in June 2024. But it would take time for the dream to see the light of reality.
The science of a perfect wave
Standing river waves look natural, but the best ones are intensely engineered.
At Taylor's Wave, designers first created a detailed digital model of the riverbed using laser-scanned topographic surveys.
The scans captured submerged bedrock, shoreline contours, and even the remains of old bridge pylons sitting in the river.
Then the project moved to the hydraulics laboratory at the Czech Technical University, considered one of the world's leading facilities for whitewater feature testing.
There, engineers built a precise 1:30 scale replica of the river section.
Pumps circulated water through the model at varying flow rates, matching real conditions on the French Broad.
Designers spent more than twelve days actually shaving surfaces, repositioning elements, adding material, and refining the shape.
Shipley compared the process to tuning a Formula 1 car in a wind tunnel.
The structure itself acts like a giant underwater ledge. It compresses the river's flow into a narrower slot, increasing speed and creating a hydraulic jump, the standing pile of water that surfers ride.
The wave has been designed to work across multiple river levels rather than at one perfect flow.
At roughly 950 cubic feet per second (cfs), the wave appears smooth and green, with an open face stretching nearly twenty feet wide.
Around 1,100 to 1,200 cfs, the lip begins to break.
Designers say the "sweet spot" sits between roughly 2,000 and 2,250 cfs, when the center steepens, and clean shoulders form on either side.
"It was real even and both shoulders were spinning tightly," Shipley said during one of the project videos.
"That's where you can start working on all the different hole moves going either direction."
For kayakers, those conditions could support advanced freestyle tricks; for surfers, lower flows may create a more forgiving standing wave suitable for surfboards and bodysurfing.
Marc Hunt told Asheville Watchdog that medium and higher flows will likely favor expert kayakers because of the steepness and power of the feature.
Lower flows should produce a cleaner face for stand-up surfing and bodyboarding.
The adjustable piece hidden underwater
One discovery in Prague changed the project significantly.
Engineers found that placing a movable concrete plate on the face of the low-flow channel dramatically improved the wave shape.
Shifting the plate slightly altered the steepness, speed, and breaking pattern of the feature.
The final design now includes stainless steel tracks embedded into the structure so the plate can later be repositioned or replaced.
The adjustments will not happen casually.
Workers would need to temporarily divert water and bring machinery into the river to move the massive slab.
But the flexibility gives the project something unusual in river surfing: tunability.
Most river waves are fixed forever once construction ends, but Taylor's Wave was designed with future tweaking in mind.
Building inside a river
The current phase of construction looks dramatic because much of it happens directly inside the river channel.
Workers first built a cofferdam, a temporary circular barrier that diverts river flow around a dry work area. Pumps remove trapped water inside the enclosure so crews can excavate the bedrock beneath.
The ledge structure is being built in stages. Once one side is complete, the cofferdam shifts to the opposite side of the river.
Recent reporting described crews drilling patterns into bedrock before fracturing it with jackhammers and excavators.
The final structure will combine natural boulders from a nearby quarry with concrete grout anchoring the materials into place.
Hurricane Helene complicated the timeline in late 2025, though the project survived with relatively limited damage.
Marc Hunt said the flood mainly caused delays tied to engineering reviews, contractor scheduling, and recovery work throughout the region.
Construction regained momentum in early 2026.
Local paddlers have already begun posting sneak peeks online as portions of the structure emerge from the water.
One of the early reports of the first water bumps in action described the unfinished feature at roughly 1,800 cfs as "a small glassy wave at very low flows, beefing up into a small wave hole at normal flows before it becomes a big breaking wave at high flows."
Not bad for a start.
Fish, floods, and the oldest river
The environmental side of the project has been almost as complex as the surfing side.
The French Broad River flows through the Southern Blue Ridge region, one of the most biologically diverse temperate ecosystems in the world.
The watershed upstream of Woodfin remains relatively intact compared to many major American rivers, with few dams interrupting aquatic movement.
Designers knew they could not simply build a recreational obstacle across the channel.
One side of Taylor's Wave includes a fish passage system developed with input from fish migration specialist Ashley Ficke of GEI Consultants.
The bypass uses natural stone, riffle-style channels, and carefully positioned boulders that reduce water velocity and create resting zones for migrating species.
The project also had to account for Craggy Dam, located less than a mile downstream.
Environmental groups and local agencies have explored the possibility of eventually removing the dam, which could alter water levels around the wave site.
Engineers modeled those scenarios and concluded that any future adjustments should remain manageable.
Federal and state agencies heavily scrutinized the permitting process, including the United States Army Corps of Engineers, wildlife agencies, and floodplain regulators.
According to project leaders, the extensive modeling and environmental review helped the project move through approvals with relatively few setbacks.
A surf spot in the mountains
For decades, western North Carolina paddlers dreamed about having a true park and play feature close to Asheville.
The nearest major whitewater parks required long drives. Ocean surfers had even fewer options.
That geography may soon change.
Taylor's Wave is expected to open sometime in 2026, though weather and river conditions still affect the schedule.
If the finished feature performs the way engineers hope, Woodfin could become one of the few places in the eastern United States where surfers and kayakers line up together for rides on the same wave.
The project's name honors Taylor Hunt, a highly regarded young paddler who died in a whitewater accident in Ecuador in 2015 at age 22.
Friends and family describe him as deeply connected to rivers and the paddling community.
Marc Hunt, his father, called the project "simply people honoring and loving a river."
May Taylor's Wave bring joy to many and progress to Woodfin, a small town that believes more in the power of watersports than many other larger and richer communities with additional resources, but with a lack of vision.
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