I Left Louisiana to Build a New Life on Solid Ground — Hurricane Helene Washed It Away

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Until Hurricane Helene hit my current town of Asheville, North Carolina, in 2024, my strongest memory of hurricane season was growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As a kid, I’d watch my father, a manager in charge of emergency preparedness at the River Bend nuclear power station, track every hurricane that entered the gulf on the NOAA website and as soon as the map displayed a cone of uncertainty — a shaded wedge indicating the hurricane’s impact — he’d leave for the station (a requirement of his job), and we wouldn’t see him until it was over. 

Eventually my dad changed roles and was home for the hurricanes, and I’d slosh after him in the yard, clearing out our drainage ditches with rakes, inspecting shingles, turning garbage cans on their sides as the driving wind threatened to tear them out from under the carport. We’d hunker down as the storm passed over us and wait for the power to come back on. It’d usually take days, but during 2005’s Hurricane Rita, which made landfall a little over a month after its better-known predecessor, Hurricane Katrina, we waited for well over a week.  

In 2019 I was 25 years old, and a homeowner in charge of my own hurricane preparations. That year my neighborhood waited for Hurricane Barry to extinguish itself; the only casualty was my car, which was pinned under a tree for three days. When the tree fell, it also took down our street’s power line. 

While we waited for the power company to come out, my neighbors and I threw a hurricane party, a lesser-known Louisiana tradition where, potluck-style, we cooked food pulled from our warming freezers. We offered each other lukewarm beer as we picked through the debris in our yards, commiserated together, and took breaks from the heat in the one house that had a backup gas generator. 

Two years later, I made the decision to sell my home in Baton Rouge, along with most of my belongings, and set out to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. I decided to hike the trail’s 2,200-mile length for many reasons — but one of them was to find a new place to call home, beyond the reach of hurricanes. 

I’d spent most of my 20s traveling the continental United States on road trips, and had fallen deeply in love with Appalachia. During my thru-hike, I spent six months walking north through this region, from northern Georgia to Mt. Katahdin, Maine. When I stood on top of that final summit, I knew that I wasn’t headed back to my home state. My long walk had only briefly sated my thirst for adventuring in the mountains, so I followed my heart to Asheville, North Carolina.

There I reconnected with Ben, a hiker I’d met in passing on my journey and my now-husband. As our first winter bloomed into spring, the changing seasons were a welcome novelty to me. There was something reassuring about the steady march of those four distinct seasons — something I had never experienced growing up in Baton Rouge. The passage of time was marked in the steady crawl of green up the mountains during spring, the afternoon summer thunderstorms, the astonishing vibrancy of autumn, and the cold quiet of winter. 

In my hometown, hurricanes surged inland from the gulf. Elsewhere, there were wildfires. Here, for the first time, I thought that the seasons weren’t always marked with disaster. It felt like a climate haven — and was even called one — until Hurricane Helene arrived in late September 2024.

Ben and I bought a hostel deep in the mountains to host hikers who were making their own way along the Appalachian Trail. After a busy spring season, we rested for the summer before our fall hiking season began in September 2024. Between pickups of hikers from nearby trailheads, as the first bands of Hurricane Helene dumped unrelenting rain on the mountains, I opened my computer and refreshed the NOAA website, watching the storm’s track through Georgia. The squiggly lines indicating possible storm tracks converged, and the cone of uncertainty fanned wide over our home.

“We need to go to the store,” I told my husband. There, I remembered the 2016 storm that flooded my hometown and took out cell service for weeks. That particular flood, which was caused by a stalled storm, not even a hurricane, was called the worst U.S. natural disaster since Hurricane Sandy’s 2012 landfall on the East Coast. I added a prepaid phone with a different carrier to our cart.

We bought non-perishable food, withdrew cash from an ATM, picked up gas cans and filled them at a nearby station. While we swapped out cans, the hurricane’s eye passed over us and the sky cleared. Ben squinted in the sun and asked me if it was all over. “No,” I replied. I resigned myself to what I knew was next. 

The sky darkened as we pulled into our driveway. Our home and hostel was on a hill — safe from flooding, but in a grove of trees that began to groan and sway in the hurricane’s gusts. We hurried inside and plugged in the phone, which had charged only to 50% when the power went out. The winds rose and howled, trees cracked ominously, and we moved down to the basement, hunkering down with the four hikers staying with us. 

For us, that was the worst of it: a tree falling on our power supply line, ripping it off the side of the house. We were inconvenienced for five days as we scheduled repairs with limited cell service. But Western North Carolina, the first place I called home since leaving Louisiana, was devastated. 

The floods and landslides Hurricane Helene triggered swept away entire towns: Chimney Rock, Marshall, even Hot Springs (a town I’d walked through on my thru-hike) were unrecognizable, scarred with tangles of debris. The death toll climbed to 251: The deadliest hurricane since Hurricane Katrina. In Asheville, it took months for the water supply to be restored.

Months after the storm, we drove through Canton, a small town outside of Asheville. After Hurricane Helene abruptly ended our fall hiker season, Ben found a new job to make ends meet and we sold our home and stayed with a friend as we looked for another place to live. Just down the hill from our friend’s place, the Pigeon River, which runs from Western North Carolina to East Tennessee, had gutted every structure along its banks. We were adrift in the aftermath, and considering all our options.

“Should we stay?” I asked, as we passed another empty, disembowled home. One side of the basement retaining wall was completely gone; the inside covered in a thick layer of dried mud and flood debris. Ben was quiet, then murmured, “I don’t know.”

Ben is originally from Wisconsin, and since Hurricane Helene, we’ve talked about moving further north. Two cities in the Midwest touted themselves as “climate havens,” but now I’m not sure that exists anywhere. Asheville had once considered itself a haven, too. 

While we understood nowhere was immune from the impacts of climate change, there was another alluring fact that we contrasted against the grim realities of potential domiciles out west. As Lake Mead, which supplies freshwater to large swaths of populations in California and Arizona, continues to dwindle, placing ourselves near the largest chain of freshwater lakes in the world was beginning to seem like a wise move.

Moving west was more out of the question as we considered other hazards: One of the reasons I’d chosen to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail instead of the Pacific Crest Trail, which winds from Mexico to Canada through California, Oregon, and Washington, was due to the East Coast’s nearly nonexistent wildfire season. 

Most thru-hikers of western trails begin their journeys knowing that they will have to skip sections of the trail closed for wildfire. Ben missed a little over 100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail during his 2022 hike when the Cedar Creek fire raged in Oregon. A year later, we hiked that section together to connect his footsteps. We walked through miles of charred earth with bandanas over our faces to filter the smoke from a new fire: a new and altogether unwelcome experience for me.

Without the threat of wildfires, Appalachian Trail hikers could count on being able to complete the entire trail in a single season. But that reality is changing. After Hurricane Helene left millions of tons of fuel on the forest floor, we entered an unseasonably dry autumn and fires sparked to life. A section of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia was closed by wildfire, then Pennsylvania. More fires broke out elsewhere in North Carolina. This year, more than 4,000 wildfires have clawed their way across the state, often threatening flood-ravaged communities still reeling from Hurricane Helene’s direct impact.

After nearly a year of searching, we found a home in Sylva, a small mountain town about 50 miles west of Asheville. We envisioned what our life would be like within these four walls and what might happen if another storm came. We walked the slope of the lot, tracking where the water would go should another hurricane hit us, and considered how high our home was in relation to a nearby creek. We measured the shade of nearby trees against the risk of fire spreading from the mountains above us. 

Those mountains — now scarred by fresh landslides and covered in downed trees — are still obeying the seasons, despite it all. The greening of spring has almost reached the summits; the wildflowers still bloom among ruin. All the things I love about these mountains are still here.

I could’ve never imagined the threat of hurricanes following me here, after I left Baton Rouge to leave it behind. But it did. I would have never anticipated wildfires in this place, a temperate rainforest, but still, they burn. So we’ve made the decision to stay here … and wait and see.