Lisa Jennings knew a trail was supposed to be there, but the area in front of her was unrecognizable. As the recreation and trails manager for the Grandfather District of Pisgah National Forest, she had helped build the path months earlier. But the singletrack had disappeared, swept away in a mudslide that scored the mountain down to bedrock.

It’s a scene that Jennings and her crew of Forest Service staff and volunteers had seen day in, day out for the three months they hiked through the forest, assessing the outcome of Hurricane Helene.

“We have a lot of damage,” Jennings said. “Across the Grandfather Ranger District, every single trail was impacted. A quarter of the trails were completely wiped out.”

On September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene ripped through the mountains of Western North Carolina, dropping up to 30 inches of rain and bringing wind gusts of 100-plus miles-per-hour. The French Broad River and many of its tributaries overflowed, its storm surge leveling homes and buildings in riverside communities like Old Fort and Marshall. Higher elevations saw mud and rock slides that wiped out roads.

Helene disrupted 20 percent of the one million acres that make up the Nantahala and Pisgah National Forests. Roughly 800 miles of trail and 900 miles of Forest Service-managed roads, as well as key infrastructure like bridges and campgrounds, were impacted. The long-term damage to the ecosystem is multi-tiered, from an increased probability of forest fires to loss of wildlife habitat, but the economic fallout from this storm can’t be overstated.

"Recreation in the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests generate $115 million in annual spending, money that goes directly to gateway communities and helps support 1,000 full-time jobs.”

The Pisgah and Nantahala drive the economies of many communities throughout Western North Carolina. Recent research from Eastern Kentucky University shows that they attract almost five million visitors each year, more than the Grand Canyon or Yosemite. Recreation in the two National Forests generate $115 million in annual spending, money that goes directly to gateway communities and helps support 1,000 full-time jobs.

“Look at a map, and you see that these communities are cradled by National Forests,” said Rachel Blackburn, the Southern Appalachians Program Coordinator at the National Forest Foundation (NFF). “That proximity has created communities that are connected economically with the forest.”

That connection is especially apparent in Old Fort, a former textile town 20 miles east of Asheville. There were once five manufacturers operating in Old Fort that employed thousands, but by the mid ‘80s, the bottom had fallen out of the industry, and most of those plants were left vacant. Old Fort shrank to a population of under 1,000 and most businesses were boarded up.

“Growing up here, there wasn’t much going on,” said Molly Poore, an Old Fort native who left the area during college and moved back after the pandemic. “I spent my childhood essentially watching the economy die, and everyone young move away.”

But then the community and Forest Service started building mountain-bike trails on the Grandfather Ranger District, which sits on the edge of downtown Old Fort. The Gateway Trails were the first to open in 2022, offering six miles of flow for all levels, and roughly 20 miles were added last fall before Helene hit.

Last summer, one of the district’s most popular hiking trails, a loop path that leads to spectacular Catawba Falls, reopened after a two-year project supported by the NFF. The painstaking work added retaining walls, boardwalks, staircases, and overlooks to improve visitor safety and offer better access to the 205-foot cascading falls.

Altogether, these trails were attracting 250 users a day to the area, according to the Forest Service. In just a few years, downtown Old Fort was reborn into a trail town, welcoming 13 new businesses ranging from a bike shop and yoga studio to a fishing-guide service and pottery store.

Molly Poore and her husband Jeremy moved back to Old Fort specifically to be a part of this new economic boon. “The fact that the town and area was starting to turn towards the forest was really exciting,” Molly said. “It’s delightful to be in town and see people riding bikes around now.”

In 2022, the couple opened Mountain Top Shuttles, a service that takes bikers to the top of some of the longest downhill trails on the East Coast, all of which are located on the outskirts of Old Fort. “The September before Helene, we were on track to do seven times more business in 2024 than in 2023,” Jeremy said. “We were about to expand with a second van and more staff.”

And then Helene hit, sweeping away much of the progress that had been made by the community. Hillman Beer Company, which sits on Mill Creek in the heart of downtown, had flood waters three feet deep inside its building.

Forest Service staff and volunteers have been working to rehabilitate the infrastructure within the forest, but some of the key trail systems, like Gateway Trails on Curtis Creek Road, and the NFF-funded Catawba Falls Trail, endured so much damage that they remain inaccessible. It will likely take years for the forest to fully recover, and many Old Fort residents have concerns about the viability of their businesses without access to key paths and trailheads.

“The storm has put a pause on our growth, and those trails are 100-percent crucial to the survival of this town,” Jeremy said.

Some federal funds have been allocated to support recovery efforts in Pisgah and Nantahala, and the NFF is helping the forests implement those resources. But to help meet the dire need, the NFF has also established the Southern National Forest Recovery Fund, unlocking and leveraging public dollars to address a greater extent of the required rehabilitation.

The NFF has done this sort of work in the past. After the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire burned almost 50,000 acres outside of Portland, Oregon, the NFF raised $200,000 and helped coordinate 36,000 hours of volunteer work to restore and reopen nearly every impacted trail. In the fall of 2015, a similar recovery fund overseen by the NFF rebuilt a bridge in a key trail system in New Hampshire’s White National Forest after it was washed away by Tropical Storm Irene’s flooding.

The scope of the Southern National Forest Recovery Fund will be even bigger: a goal of $250 million has been set to support recovery efforts. It’s a big fund, but Helene was a big storm.

"Public funds don’t come as quickly, and often require additional administrative hurdles. Private sources will be the difference in getting the crucial recovery done faster.”

-Rachel Blackburn, NFF’s Southern Appalachians Program Coordinator

“The sticker price of this recovery is in the billions,” said the NFF’s Blackburn. “We are grateful for the available public funds and will work diligently with the Forest Service to ensure those funds are implemented as quickly as possible, but additional private support will allow the NFF to do more, faster.

The Forest Service knows that time is of the essence in Old Fort, so Jennings and her crews have prioritized opening the Gateway Trails as soon as possible. Jennings is optimistic that, with proper funding, they can get the district’s most popular trails open to the public by Memorial Day.

“This storm felt like a gut punch to Old Fort because we all worked so hard for years to build what people were just now starting to enjoy,” said Jennings, who adds that Old Fort’s economic recovery can begin with the trails. “We know folks will come back when the trails open. That’s what the community needs right now.”

Check out the Southern National Forest Recovery Fund at nationalforests.org/southernforestsrecovery and contribute to the recovery of small communities around the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests.

About the Author

Graham Averill is a freelance journalist and all around outdoors lover living in Asheville, North Carolina. He and his son rode mountain bikes at the Gateway Trails often before Hurricane Helene.

Cover photo of the extensive damage to campground infrastructure both the Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests suffered. Photo by Derek DiLuzio

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