Helene C4 Crew Member's Reflections 1 Year After Hurricane Helene

One year ago this October, Hurricane Helene struck the Carolinas with all the finesse of  a dumptruck driving through a bed of flowers. Huge blowdowns devastated forests, turning  acres of trees into a pile of pick-up sticks. Trickles of ephemeral streams became landslides that scoured hillsides, and rivers overtopped their banks and kept going, destroying entire blocks of buildings.

Everyone in our North Carolina community had some part to play in the recovery process. While undoing the damage could feel insurmountable at times, by focusing on our own scope and taking baby steps toward healing, we have come remarkably far. 

Helene recovery has been an all hands on deck situation, and our relationships with partners and volunteers has been essential in helping the CCC take on the challenge. While the first phases of opening up our trails involved mostly hiking through with chainsaws and cutting downed trees out of the trail, by this summer we were able to move on to some larger scale projects, and man did our community show up to make it happen.

The hurricane caused particular devastation to the town of Chimney Rock, just outside of our beloved crag, Rumbling Bald. In downtown Chimney Rock Village, the Broad River swept away countless homes and businesses. The CCC’s Village Boulders Trail, originating right in that downtown area, required a large reroute and step construction. YouthWorks, an organization that takes teenagers on mission trips, stepped up in a big way to help us. Different groups of young volunteers from all over the country came out to Chimney Rock week after week. Their participation in our project represented a small piece of the support received from outside of our community that came to our aid in the face of this disaster. By the end of the summer, we had dug a rerouted entrance the to our trail, built three staircases, and maintained the older parts of the trail. Our trail entrance overlooks the Chimeny Rock Smokehouse, and over months of working there I watched the construction on it progress as it slowly came back to life, until one day I finally spotted customers eating barbecue on their newly rebuilt deck. This little puzzle piece of the recovery process not only provides access to boulders but also a hike up to Grand View Overlook, which has an unbeatable view of Hickory Nut Falls and Chimney Rock State Park. Our partnership with YouthWorks helps just a bit more with the revitalization of this beautiful town that centers tourism and outdoor recreation.

Just north of Chimney Rock is Buffalo Creek Park, owned by the Town of Lake Lure, where we maintain trails to bouldering and even a few sport and trad routes. While we cleared our Upper Boulders Trail earlier in the winter, other parts of this trail system remained impassable due to massive rootball holes, landslides, and countless downed trees. In this case, CCC was able to step in and help our friends at Conserving Carolina and Rutherford Outdoor Coalition. We participated in a couple of massive group-effort days spearheaded by Conserving Carolina. At first, the network of different land stewards and volunteers was almost too complex to wrap my head around, but it gave me the opportunity to ask a lot of questions! I loved learning each person’s different approach to conservation based on their own expertise and personal interests. Relationships with ROC and CC allow us to build a web that is stronger than we are individually. Helping to clear miles of the Weed Patch Trail in Buffalo Creek Park with an army of sawyers from ROC, CC, and C4, helped create connectivity between all the trail systems around Lake Lure and Chimney Rock.

Another huge part of this summer was our Trail Days of Summer. At these special volunteer days, our partnership with Black Diamond allowed us to offer prizes for our hardworking volunteers. One of the crowning achievements of this volunteer work is our reroute at Pace Cliffs. This area on Green River Gamelands is home to some gorgeous steep, featured, cliffs with tons of mixed and trad routes to be explored. We laid out a reroute here to replace a social trail that in typical climber fashion bombed straight down the hill. The reroute is designed to be a much milder hike, with gentle switchbacks and wide tread that sheds runoff from the trail. As if a once-in-a-lifetime hurricane wasn’t enough, a wildfire swept through this area in the spring, but the land is a great teacher in resilience. By the time our volunteers hit the trail, fragile green shoots were already beginning to poke up through the scorched landscape. Over five different volunteer days at Pace, we saw familiar faces like Babs and Miles, as well as some first time volunteers. Having the extra hands digging tread and moving rocks is only part of what volunteers contribute. Having Sean Coburn’s golden retriever, Waylon, running around is a big morale booster, and certain people you can always count on to sit around in the parking lot after and crack open a cold one (ahem, Babs). Working with groups of people who show up because they care about the community and care about quality climbing access is just more fun.

Hiking and climbing trails are just one piece of the patchwork of destruction that Helene caused, but trails aren’t only for recreation.  They provide a path for community building, economic stimulation, and an outlet for stress relief. Recovery remains a massive ongoing effort in Western North Carolina, but what we have accomplished one year later shows that we are stronger when we lean on each other and work together to heal. While the hurricane flooded our valleys and mountains, what rose to the surface was the power of connection. In the act of rebuilding together, we use the debris as fertilizer to regrow like saplings from the ashes, green and new.