In late September 2024, a hurricane tore through the southern mountain city of Asheville, North Carolina. With a creative economy that depends on tourism, the community is now rebuilding from the ground up. Journalist Megan DeMatteo returns to a city she knows well to see its grassroots recovery in action.
It’s not every day that tourists get to experience community revival in action. But in Asheville, North Carolina, an artsy, mid-size city cradled by misty, rolling hills, that’s exactly what visitors will see.
Last September, Hurricane Helene ripped through southern Appalachia, displacing hundreds of artists from Asheville’s riverside studios and dissolving swaths of neighboring towns like Bat Cave, Chimney Rock and Swannanoa into riverbeds. Nine months later, citizens are still picking up the pieces.
They do so without much camaraderie from the White House—the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has twice denied Governor of North Carolina Josh Stein’s request for 100 percent matching emergency funds. But what they lack in resources they possess in spirit. They strategize and restore with remarkable determination, even as folks everywhere call Helene the “1,000-year flood.”
Watching Helene’s coverage from my apartment in New York City was painful. I felt like I couldn’t do anything from afar to help the community that once nurtured me as a grad student from 2013 to 2016. But when I visited twice this spring, the grassroots collaboration I witnessed was nothing short of inspiring.
For starters, most of the wreckage had been neatly organized into piles, awaiting transportation in a queue sizable enough to fill over 3,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools with debris. Workers and volunteers labored in neon vests, and business owners popped in and out of each other’s storefronts, greeting one another with the matter-of-fact intimacy born only from surviving shared calamity.
Helene’s destruction challenged every assumption anyone might have made about the region’s climate resilience. Four major rivers stretch across East Tennessee and Western North Carolina—the French Broad, Swannanoa, Nolichucky, and Pigeon. Although the southern highlands enjoy mild weather, their land shielded from coastal floods by the Blue Ridge Mountain range, there’s only so high a community can climb when the rivers rise.
I understand businesses benefit from tourism dollars, yet visiting Asheville for the first time after Helene felt a bit like rolling up to a friend’s house after it had just burned down and expecting them to serve me dinner. The pair laugh, putting my worries to rest. “The culture of Asheville is hosting people,” says Cavanaugh.
And rise they did. On September 27, 2024, the waterways surged to heights of a three-story building after Helene brought record rainfall. Dams gushed at double the rate of Niagara Falls, spilling over a delicate system of early 1900s infrastructure and modern hydroelectric facilities, dousing the ribbons of small towns folded throughout the valleys.
With major highways and backroads badly damaged, tourism businesses shut down—a devastating reality for a region that frequently makes more than a quarter of its annual revenue in October and November, when the leaves blaze amber and auburn.
It was a domino effect: Multiple municipalities lost power, utilities, cell service and GPS signal, along with access to trails, roads and riverways. And when immersion into nature is an area’s biggest tourist draw—a three-billion-dollar one at that—businesses must rely on shared infrastructure to access the outdoors. In this way, not a single person escaped the impact of Helene, whether the river swallowed up their home or not.
As Steven Foy, outpost operations director for the Nantahala Outdoor Center (NOC), explains to me, rafting companies with outposts in Asheville’s neighboring towns lost critical entry and exit points to their most popular rivers due to flooding. “We had four big ramps … right next to a Duke-owned [Duke Energy] and operated power plant,” said Foy. “That power plant was the mechanism that controlled our [river] releases. It was flooded and damaged.”
Thankfully, the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) funded the development of a new ramp so the NOC’s season could run again in the spring. Foy says NOC’s customers have enjoyed a victorious return to the Pigeon River, a popular whitewater attraction running below Interstate 40, where US transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg once stood in disbelief, humbled by the “torn apart rock and asphalt” from Helene’s “shocking, destructive power.”
Foy welcomes the fact that some tourists might want to visit East Tennessee and Western North Carolina just to witness the rebuilding. If so, rafting the Pigeon is a thrilling way to do it. “We’re at this really unique moment in time of this river in recovery,” said Foy. “You get to see the construction happening,” he added, noting that some tourists even like to wave to machinery operators from the boat.
He says the rapids have shifted a little bit as a result of the damage. “But they’re still the same characteristic,” he says. “They’ll be rebuilt in full—maybe better. If anything, you’re not getting the same old rerun; you’re just getting episode two of the same show.”
Amid this rebuilding, a friendly community will greet you. In most places throughout Asheville and the 27 surrounding counties damaged by Helene, people are eager to feel pride and exuberance once again. They’ll welcome you to their tables, invite you inside with warm smiles, and extend the signature hospitality found in Southern Appalachia.
This welcome is often demonstrated through food. A few blocks from downtown to the South Slope neighborhood, Top Chef contestant Ashleigh Shanti serves up pan-Southern dishes influenced by Black Appalachian cuisine; try the half-inch thick steel trout bologna, served cold-cut style and layered with an American cheese slice on a fluffy potato roll. Shanti opened her 2025 James Beard Award-winning concept, Good Hot Fish, in January 2024, just nine months before Helene. In the weeks after the storm, Shanti joined forces with another Beard-nominated chef, Silver Iocovozzi, to cook hot meals for neighbors.
“If we don’t have the visitors, then it’s just not going to feel like Asheville,” says Shari Robins, co-owner of Firelight at Shope Creek, a peaceful retreat near the Blue Ridge Parkway, a scenic 489-mile (787 kilometers) National Parkway that runs along the spine of the Blue Ridge mountains. Robins tells me she and business partner Amy Cavanaugh are eager to get back to the Asheville they know and love. “And the better things that may come,” adds Cavanaugh.
“I am extremely optimistic that there is the desire, vision, and the right kind of leaders in place to help us reimagine Asheville for those future generations.”
- Shelton Steele, co-founder, Wrong Way River Lodge and Cabins
If you see damage, ignore it, says Cavanaugh as there’s so much beauty to behold. “Even with the parts of the Blue Ridge Parkway trails and businesses that are closed, the stuff that’s open is still so great and wonderful that [visiting Asheville is] better than visiting a lot of other places,” Cavanaugh tells me.
I tell them I feel a little guilty during my three-night stay in one of their cabins, where I spent mornings wrapped in a soft white robe, sipping spiced hot chocolate homemade by the Firelight staff on my deck. I understand businesses benefit from tourism dollars, yet visiting Asheville for the first time after Helene felt a bit like rolling up to a friend’s house after it had just burned down and expecting them to serve me dinner.
The pair laugh. “The culture of Asheville is hosting people,” says Cavanaugh. “That’s what we do, and that’s how we thrive,” adds Robins. Yes, spirits were low following the storm, but optimism has returned, they said. “Since leaves started coming back and things started greening up, people generally, I feel, are in a much better space,” Cavanaugh says.
Shelton Steele, co-founder of Wrong Way River Lodge and Cabins, echoes this sentiment. Alongside co-founder and longtime friend Joe Balcken, Steele runs an ‘urban glamping’ campsite poised atop a hillside looking out over the French Broad River in West Asheville. Sitting squarely in the flood plain, the property’s design is an example of climate resilience. A high-tech retaining wall supports a steep bank of earth leading up to two rows of cabins perched so high up, their roofs crest the treeline.
“It was a feat of civil engineering,” says architect Brent Campbell, whose firm designed the buildings and grounds. Campbell said the concrete support structures were built to withstand not only floodwaters, but all the debris that might float down the river, too. During Helene, he saw shipping containers, telephone poles, tables, trees, houses, and campers all riding the rapids. “Usually people think about [floods] in terms of sea water rising, but sea water doesn’t have a floating tractor trailer slamming into stuff.”
Remarkably, Wrong Way Cabins reported zero structural damage. “The things that got wet, we replaced,” says Steele. “We’re back in business.” He acknowledged the tragedy and loss that every Ashevillian has experienced and calls this moment a “massive change agent” and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reflect on how tourist towns can reimagine sustainable development, both environmentally and economically, for the people who live on after us.
“I am extremely optimistic that there is the desire, vision, and the right kind of leaders in place to help us reimagine Asheville for those future generations,” Steele says. Residential designer Felipe Santander, who specializes in tailoring architecture designs to their surrounding landscape, affirms Steele’s attitude. “As humans, we’ve been creating settlements next to the water our whole lives. Cities are going to be developed next to rivers no matter what. But we do need to be more aware, be more prepared, and educate.”
Next door to Wrong Way Cabins is Asheville’s River Arts District (RAD), which bore the considerable brunt of damage within Asheville’s city limits—but RAD Artists Association president Jeffrey Burroughs reports that activity in the district has been “ferociously busy.”
Starting with a festival in November that helped artists sell over one million dollars’ worth of work and raise an additional million dollars in donations for the 350 artists who lost their studios, the RAD Artists Association pulled off another event in May this year. They invited attendees to participate in neighborhood beautification and plant flowers along sidewalks where most of the debris has been cleared.
The district also launched the RAD Art Market, which takes place every Saturday in the parking lot of a local energy company. “We have displaced artists set up there,” Burroughs tells me.
“You can build a concrete bunker, but if you don’t have the right community, it means nothing. That’s where the power comes from, neighbors helping each other.”
- Felipe Santander, residential designer
While individual artists stay nimble, established institutions with higher overheads are not necessarily out of the weeds. North Carolina Glass Center, a nonprofit studio and gallery founded in 2015 with the goal of supporting the region’s glass craft traditions, is hopeful it can continue serving as a low-cost workspace for artists—but it’s not easy.
“We lost all of October and part of November,” said executive director Candace Reilly. Like its neighbors, the center’s income relies primarily on the tourist economy, accounting for 80 percent of its total revenue; and a quarter of that during leaf season. Tourists can take a glassblowing class while a working artist helps them select colors,and shape the red-hot blob into their desired form, using nothing more than gravity and a few wooden tools.
On top of the economic blows, Reilly says Ashevillians still struggle with post-traumatic stress from witnessing the storm’s damage. She still shivers thinking about the first time she heard thunder after Helene. Official records tally Helene’s death toll at around 117 people in North Carolina, 12 in Tennessee, and at least 232 total in the six states affected. Yet, Reilly tells me nearly everyone knows of a missing person who hasn’t yet turned up.
The wisest words about Hurricane Helene come from my Lyft driver taking me back to the airport; a woman with a southern accent so thick, she says the automated robot at the Bojangles drive-thru doesn’t understand her food orders. She said it takes an event like Helene for people to realize we’re all in this life together. Money, status symbols, and political stature no longer matter after “nature takes everything from you,” she tells me.
In that regard, there may be no better place than Asheville to be after a disaster like Helene. As Santander puts it, “the mountains were not meant for this storm—but the community was built for the aftermath… You can build a concrete bunker, but if you don’t have the right community, it means nothing. That’s where the power comes from, neighbors helping each other.”
And that’s the real heart of Asheville and its neighboring towns: The people. That includes vacationers, an essential thread in the region’s fabric. You’re invited to become part of the story by showing up, enjoying the beauty of renewal, and connecting with the land and its stewards. Your visit helps write the next chapter of a place built, again and again, by community members who care for one another.
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Megan DeMatteo is a travel writer, journalist, and creator whose work appears in publications such as Fodor’s Travel, Dwell, Marie Claire and Insider. She also writes Unimaginably Good Travel, a column for Yahoo spotlighting meaningful journeys. Her adventures have taken her from Costa Rica to Chile to a séance in Oscar Wilde’s former dorm in Dublin. A first-generation blue crab picker with a master’s in creative writing, she’s drawn to destinations that combine a little luxury with a lot of heart.
