Mountain Provisions still downtown, but fire two years ago at Ashland Plaza location forced move

By Emma Coke, Ashland.news

Just over two years after a three-alarm fire destroyed their original building in Ashland Plaza, Mountain Provisions has finally reopened their doors, this time in a new spot downtown.  

After a long struggle with insurance (that’s still going on) and switch of plans, their new location at 357 E. Main St. opened its doors to customers on July 5. Opening at “the bubble” of Pacific Crest Trail activity, the height of when hikers enter Ashland, Mountain Provisions has already seen swift business.

“It’s kind of crazy to open the doors and try to hit the ground running at 150 miles an hour,” said Owner Bryant Helgeland. 

According to Helgeland, reception has been great from the community. 

“I mean, we’ve had we’ve had people asking us since the day after the fire, ‘When are you going to reopen?’” Helgeland said. 

For Helgeland, being back has brought a sense of normalcy to his life. 

“I’ve been doing this for almost 25 years in town,” Helgeland said. “It’s why I moved to Ashland, and the two years that we were closed was the most disconnected from the industry I’ve ever been.”

Helgeland and Nana Langton, store manager and buyer, are also happy to be back in a bigger location — almost five times bigger, to be exact. The larger space has allowed them to sell an expanded collection of merchandise, including new styles of shoes, more backpacks, more winter gear and the possibility of paddleboards next summer. 

According to Helgeland, they were outgrowing their old space before the fire. 

“How the hell did we do it?” Langton said. 

For example, their backstock area was a measly 75 square feet compared to their now 4,000 square feet of backstock.

“We literally had space for like eight models and backpacks and that was it,” Helgeland said. “So we had to be very picky about stuff and intentionally not carry things that we knew we needed and knew that we could sell to prioritize things that we knew we would sell better.”

Now, they finally have the space they need to run their business the way they wanted to, Helgeland said.

“This space allows us to expand into other product categories that we knew we wanted to carry,” Helgeland said. “We just didn’t have anywhere to put it.”

Langton emphasized that, even with a bigger store, they’re still the same business.

“Just because we’re in a new location and we’re bigger doesn’t mean that we’re not staying true to what we were doing prior to the fire,” Langton said.

Getting to their opening day was not an easy path. 

“(It took) a lot of elbow grease,” Langton said.

“And a handful of contractors and good chunk of money,” Helgeland added. 

From the get-go, the two realized they would be in for a long struggle with insurance.

The day after the fire, their insurance company called Helgeland about sending a group down to pick up their belongings and evaluate what could be cleaned and saved and what needed to be disposed of. Helgeland accepted, and later found out the firm their insurance hired had never done a commercial fire recovery before. 

“They showed up the next day with three guys in a sprinter van,” Helgeland said. “I was like, ‘2,000 square feet worth of retail store is not fitting in that sprinter van.’”

It, unsurprisingly, didn’t. For the next week, the three guys drove back and forth in their sprinter van from Portland to Ashland, dropping everything off comingled (inventory and not) in a Portland warehouse. 

“I spent the next year trying to figure out how I would get everything back that wasn’t inventory,” Helgeland said. 

They eventually had to retrieve their belongings on their own, renting a 26-foot U-Haul trailer they stuffed to the ceiling. 

The experience caused Helgeland and Langton to quickly learn “you’re not in control,” Langton said.

“You have to have patience for kind of whatever’s thrown at you,” Langton said.

On top of the confusion surrounding retrieving the business’ belongings, Helgeland also learned there was a clause in the commercial lease stating that if 50% or more of the building is damaged, the lease terminates. 

While they were to have business interruption coverage for two years, a year-and-a-half after the fire, Mountain Provision’s insurance terminated the coverage because “they said under normal circumstances the building should be rebuilt by now and you should have moved back in any business,” Helgeland said. 

“In dealing with the remediation company or my landlord, I’m no longer an interested party,” Helgeland said. “I’m just the guy who used to rent the building.”

Work on Little Tokyo, which also suffered fire damage, also hasn’t been going smoothly. According to Helgeland, work just began two months ago on the space. 

With insurance struggles and losing business interruption coverage, Helgeland and Langton’s plan to return to their old space wasn’t going to happen, so they turned to finding a new spot to call home. They wanted to stay close to downtown, but not necessarily in the Plaza like before due to limited parking and smaller buildings. 

The lease on their new building started Dec. 1, followed by seven months of construction to turn the space — formerly home to Catalyst Ashland and, before that, the Ashland Art Center — into Mountain Provisions.

“We’re excited to see old familiar faces walking through the door and being able to reconnect with a community that we didn’t really get to connect with,” Langton said. 

Email Ashland.news reporter intern Emma Coke at emmasuecoke@gmail.com.