By Emily Stonehouse

Many trees were destroyed as a result of the ice storm that slammed Haliburton County the last weekend of March. At the same time, many businesses were impacted by the outages and unpredictable weather patterns.

So what happens when your literal business is in a tree?

For Lauren Green of Fort Treehouse Co., they are just starting to navigate the damages on their properties. “At our Hartwood property in South Gelert, it looked like something out of a movie,” she said. “Trees toppled everywhere, no clear path of destruction, just total chaos across the forest. We’re talking hundreds of trees down or damaged.”

Green said she was shocked, since the business owner and her husband/business partner Cam, live just North of Minden, and while they lost power for eight days, only had minimal damage to their property. A testament to the unpredictability of Mother Nature. “We barely had any debris come down,” she said. “Hartwood by comparison looked almost apocalyptic.”

Fort Treehouse Co. currently has one treehouse in Minden, called the Baltic. The luxury rental space is booked up throughout the year, and is a major tourist draw to the region. At the time of the storm, Green shared that they were in the final stages of developing a new property in Gelert, which they refer to as Hartwood. The intention of this build is to include three independent treehouses, as well as a Nordic Spa and a communal cafe on the property. The process has taken nearly three years to get off the ground, with a desired opening date of September of this year.

While the minimal damage to the buildings will be covered via insurance, Green is concerned about the property damage to Hartwood. “The reality is that clearing the forest is a huge job – and not a cheap one,” she said. “After bringing in arborists to assess, we’re looking at an estimated $25,000 to $30,000 just to clean up the central parts of the property. That doesn’t include the trails or the rest of the land. Those areas are on us.”

The glimmer of hope through these damages is the fact that the actual treehouses managed to stay successfully intact throughout the storm.

“(The storm) gave us a powerful look at the strength of what we’ve been building,” noted Green. “Despite the devastation across the forest, not a single treehouse had a tree on it. None of the host trees sustained any significant damage. That’s a big deal.”

She noted that all the buildings held up “incredibly well”, and credited the choice of trees and stability of the structures to the successes. “Every one of our builds begins with carefully selecting and assessing the host trees, and seeing them come through something like this gives us even more confidence in our process,” she said. “We’ve built in redundancies in case anything ever happens to a host tree, but it’s reassuring to know that all the care and planning pays off in real-world conditions.”

Green hopes to chop and chip the downed trees in a way that returns them to the land they came from, and will be used to protect root systems around higher traffic areas on the site, which will continue to add nutrients back into the forest as they naturally decompose.

Despite the major set-backs, Green and her team are continuing on the journey for a fall-opening of Hartwood. She noted that she intends to open up the booking platform for the site shortly, and hopes to stay on track while staff work diligently to continue the build while they process the aftermath of the storm. “We keep going,” she said. “That’s really the only option. Our team took a single day after the storm to regroup, then we were back on site. We’re fortunate to have a resilient and committed crew.”

Green is choosing to approach the damages with a glass half-full mindset, noting that she believes the builds are hardy, and aligned with the natural movements of the forest. “While no structure is completely immune, this storm was proof that building in the canopy – when done with intention and respect – doesn’t increase your risk,” she said. “If anything, it showed the strength and integrity of the design.”