With our camper van (named Morgan) packed to the gills, we headed to North Carolina just after Labor Day 2024 for a two-month-long stay. It being hurricane season, we figured we might encounter some lively weather down there, but we never imagined that we'd be in the region when a 1000-year storm hit. We had been following weather forecasts for the Appalachians for days when CAT-4 Hurricane Helene made landfall in the Big Bend area of Florida on September 26, each report more worrisome than the last. They were calling for possibly "catastrophic" rain and perhaps 80-MPH wind in WNC by Friday, and though evacuation orders were sparse we decided to decamp to central Tennessee to ride out the storm.

    What befell those in the path of the hurricane--from Florida through Georgia and then up the spine of the Appalachians into western North Carolina, northeast Tennessee, and southwest Virginia--shattered many lives and reshaped the very geography of the land. We had evacuated to a farm near Nashville, and soon stories of the devastation on the other side of the Smokeys began to emerge: up to 30 inches of rain in some upland places; massive flooding of the rivers and streams that course through the narrow valleys; landslides tearing houses from foundations and closing interstates; upheavals of local roads and bridges leaving many stranded; destruction of thousands of homes and businesses; and, most tragically, the loss of many lives. We heeded the word of emergency teams there: please stay away.

    It has taken us a while to write about our time in WNC last fall, especially as this past winter bore down on residents who had lost everything. But come January 2025 there was renewed hope that the clean-up and rebuilding would pick up, and when we passed through the Asheville area in March of this year we were relieved to see that the stricken towns are slowly recovering from their losses. Here then is an account of our trip to North Carolina in late 2024, a narrative that falls into two parts--before and after the storm, with a follow-up trek through some of the affected areas in Spring 2025.