The Storm Is Over. The Recovery Isn’t.
Two years ago, Hurricane Helene came through Western North Carolina and absolutely devastated parts of the mountains.
We all remember the pictures.
Flooded towns. Roads washed away. Bridges gone. Homes destroyed. Businesses wiped out. Communities isolated.
And eventually, like every disaster, the television cameras moved on.
But here’s the thing:
Helene didn’t move on.
Go deep into the Great Smoky Mountains today and you can still find a very simple sign at the beginning of a trail:
CLOSED.
Two years later.
And that’s what caught my attention about this story, because Helene didn’t just destroy homes and businesses.
It damaged something we don’t normally think of as infrastructure:
our public lands.
The Great Smoky Mountains.
The Blue Ridge Parkway.
The Appalachian Trail.
Trails were washed away. Bridges disappeared. Landslides destroyed roads. Campgrounds closed. Entire sections became inaccessible.
According to the article, Helene damaged more than 800 miles of the Appalachian Trail. At one point, approximately 430 miles were closed.
Think about that.
The Appalachian Trail stretches from Georgia to Maine, and one storm managed to damage hundreds and hundreds of miles of it.
But here’s where this story gets really interesting.
Because we tend to think of these places as recreation.
Nice places to hike.
Nice places to drive.
Nice places to take the grandkids.
They’re much more than that.
They’re economic infrastructure.
The Great Smoky Mountains National Park draws millions of visitors.
The Blue Ridge Parkway had 16.7 million visitors in 2024, and those visitors spent more than $1.5 billion in surrounding communities.
Where does that money go?
Hotels.
Restaurants.
Gas stations.
Coffee shops.
Outdoor stores.
Campgrounds.
Breweries.
Little family businesses.
Places most of us have probably driven past without ever realizing that their survival may depend on people coming down that mountain road.
So when a bridge washes out in the mountains, you haven’t just lost a bridge.
You’ve potentially lost customers.
When a trail closes, you haven’t just inconvenienced hikers.
You’ve changed where thousands of people travel and where they spend their money.
There’s a bridge over the Nolichucky River that Helene swept away.
And according to this story, hikers still have to take a four-mile road detour because that bridge hasn’t been replaced.
Four miles might not sound like much sitting in your living room.
Try adding four miles when you’ve already been walking the Appalachian Trail all day.
And there’s a hostel nearby that depends on those hikers.
Suddenly that missing bridge isn’t just a recreational problem.
It’s somebody’s livelihood.
But here’s the part of the story that gives me some optimism.
The economy came back remarkably quickly.
Across the 14 Western North Carolina counties hit hardest by Helene, sales-tax collections dropped about 8 percent immediately following the storm.
Some counties were hit considerably harder.
Buncombe County fell more than 15 percent.
Mitchell County fell more than 13 percent.
Avery County fell more than 10 percent.
That’s a serious economic shock.
But then something happened.
People came back.
Businesses reopened.
Tourists returned.
Communities rebuilt.
And by 2025, according to the figures reported in the article, every one of those counties had rebounded, and most had surpassed their 2023 sales-tax collection levels.
That’s an extraordinary part of this story.
The economic recovery actually moved faster than the physical recovery.
People were ready to return before all the roads and trails were ready for them.
And now there’s an opportunity here.
Because the people rebuilding the Appalachian Trail aren’t simply saying:
“Put everything back exactly where it was.”
They’re asking a smarter question:
How do we rebuild it so it’s better prepared for the next storm?
They’re looking at erosion.
Drainage.
Trail design.
Water crossings.
Heavy use.
Changing conditions.
In other words, don’t simply replace what failed.
Learn from what failed.
And that’s a philosophy that goes way beyond hiking trails.
When disaster destroys something, the objective shouldn’t automatically be to recreate yesterday.
Sometimes you’ve been handed an opportunity—an incredibly painful opportunity—but an opportunity nonetheless—to build tomorrow.
Build the bridge stronger.
Build the road smarter.
Improve the drainage.
Protect the communities.
Think about what the next fifty years look like instead of simply rebuilding what existed fifty years ago.
And yes, Congress has provided billions of dollars for disaster recovery, including major funding for the Blue Ridge Parkway.
But money by itself doesn’t rebuild anything.
People do.
Engineers do.
Construction workers do.
Park employees do.
Volunteers do.
Local businesses do.
Communities do.
And that’s ultimately what I take away from Western North Carolina two years after Helene.
Resilience isn’t pretending nothing happened.
It’s looking directly at what happened, learning from it, and deciding what you’re going to build next.
The storm lasted a few days.
The rebuilding will take years.
But Western North Carolina is coming back.
And maybe the goal shouldn’t be to make it exactly what it was before Helene.
Maybe the goal should be to make it stronger than it was before Helene.
1 comment