A year after Helene, river guides in Appalachia navigate a new world todayheadline

On a clear, sunny day in May, just a few weeks into the Smoky Mountain rafting season, Heather Ellis took a dozen people through the Pigeon River Gorge to celebrate its grand reopening. She led them over and through roaring rapids with a practiced ease. “Forward!” she called. When the water rose, everyone heaved on their oar, ducking against the spray. The rubber float surged forward. “And relax.” 

Ellis, bubbly and blonde and smiling behind an enormous pair of shades, is overjoyed to be back on the water after an uncertain winter. It has been nine months since Hurricane Helene ravaged central Appalachia, crumbling highways and roads, leveling forests, and reshaping rivers.

The Pigeon runs through Western North Carolina into the eastern end of Tennessee, roughly parallel to Interstate 40. When the river flooded after Helene, it took huge bites out of the highway, closing it for months and isolating small communities. Debris tumbled into the river, and the crews scrambling to make repairs have replaced sections of riverbank with concrete. Their efforts have been complicated by ongoing flooding and mudslide, creating new scars alongside the old.  

 “The whole thing basically changed,” Ellis said. “It moved major boulders and mountains.”

Ellis possesses an infectiously sunny outlook, even though things have been hard. She lost her home and most of her belongings to Helene and lives in a camper parked in the lot at work. She shares her uncertainty with many thousands of people, especially those who are paid to lead visitors into the beautiful places that make the Great Smoky Mountains so popular. 

As many as 149,000 people in North Carolina alone draw a paycheck related in some way to outdoor recreation, and by one count the seven rivers of the southern Blue Ridge help sustain 68,000 jobs. The Pigeon River provides about $6 million in revenue annually to the rural counties along its banks, and some seven million people visit the French Broad, which flows through Asheville, each year. Rafting is second only to property taxes in the amount of money it brings to Cocke County, Tennessee.

Helene’s disruption of the rafting industry underscores how climate change — and the extreme weather it brings — threatens tourism-dependent economies. A dozen outfitters on the Pigeon, French Broad, and other rivers shut down after the storm and haven’t reopened. Many guides moved on. Those who remain grapple with what Helene wrought, trying to work during a season that, while active, remains well short of its usual vigor.

Those crammed into Ellis’ boat shouted joyfully over the din of roaring rapids, and when the water calmed, guides playfully pushed each other in. Yet everyone was keenly aware of what’s been lost. The patterns of the most popular rapids have shifted. Some vanished, others grew bigger and wilder. In some ways, the Pigeon is a different river. “Stuff will come back eventually but, you know … it’ll probably be a bit,” Ellis said as the boat approached a construction zone.

The bustling work on shore highlighted the dissonance of life on the Pigeon. To the left, the riverbank met a dense and dark mountain forest. To the right, it rose sharply into concrete and gravel shoring up the storm-damaged highway. The sound of singing birds and running water mingled with the rumble of heavy equipment and traffic on Interstate 40. As Ellis’s raft passed the site, she waved. A man in a bulldozer honked a friendly response.

Hurricane Helene made a mess of the Pigeon. Much of the debris the storm knocked loose and the flood carried away choked the waterway, which meanders 70 miles through Pisgah National Forest and drains a watershed of some 700 square miles. Downed trees, vast tangles of brush, even the remains of buildings that once stood along its banks clogged it for months. Although an intrepid rafter or kayaker could run its full length, some of the most popular spots for putting in remain inaccessible.

Other rivers that course through the Smokies saw similar devastation, and uneven recoveries. Some are running clear and strong enough to host rafters, others lag behind. “It’s a story of haves and have nots,” said Kevin Colbourn, executive director of American Whitewater and a river enthusiast himself.

The Pigeon is among those that are open for business but marred by quarrying, riverbank stabilization, and construction. Others, like the French Broad, are ready to ride but businesses along their shores have been washed out. The Nolichucky, which runs 115 miles through North Carolina into Tennessee, is, to Colbourn’s mind, the most tragic. Rafting season is on hold as CSX Transportation rebuilds its rail line through the gorge. A lot of people aren’t happy about that. Guides have watched, aghast, as the company dug rock from the riverbed to shore up the tracks. “‘The river will be there,’ is what people say,” Colbourn said. “What the storm taught us is that’s not always true.”

When the flood swept dozens of businesses away, many guides were left without a reason to return. Others have been hindered by the lugubrious pace of recovery and reconstruction. With nothing else to do, Trey Moore, a kayak instructor and guide in Erwin, Tennessee, turned to activism to get the Nolichucky open again. The river has long kept towns like his alive even as other industries moved on by attracting a steady stream of people who fall in love with the area and settle there to raise families. “We’re a small, tight-knit community,” he said of those who work the rivers.

Moore, a guide for more than 20 years, said many feel a responsibility to their neighbors. During and after the storm, many used their swiftwater rescue skills, and knowledge of the rivers’ contours, to pull people from raging waters. Some hiked for miles up broken roads bringing supplies to isolated elders. Others administered first aid and guided helicopters and first responders to those needing help. They saved lives.

That overwhelming feeling of purpose has since given way to worry. Guiding people down a river is by most accounts incredibly fun for people who love it, but it can also be an unstable way to earn a living. It’s a dangerous seasonal gig, it doesn’t pay all that well, and it rarely comes with benefits. Many who do it live in communal housing or mobile homes. So when the jobs vanished, a lot of them left. “We’ve lost so many guides to so many other rivers,” Moore said. “The guides that are sticking around are struggling.”

Moore is outraged by how CSX is handling reconstruction of the railroad and feels agencies like the U.S. Forest Service have backburnered people like him. As someone who loves the river, and as chairman of the Nolichucky River Outdoor Association, he feels a responsibility to help restore the paddling community to glory. In the meantime, a lot of guides are working on debris removal crews clearing the rivers and surrounding areas. Leslie Beninato is among them. She worked as a guide and owned a small boat rental business before Helene. “Both places do not exist anymore,” she said. “It was just, ‘Oh God, what am I going to do now?’” 

These days she leads crews picking trash off the banks of the French Broad. The only requirement is that anyone joining her must have lost their job to Helene. Most worked in rafting or other river-related industries. Some of them have cleared away remnants of their own workplaces.

Beninato is in her late thirties, and has lived in the mountains of western North Carolina since graduating from Appalachian State University 20 years ago. Unlike some of the younger, greener guides, she’s settled enough to feel stubborn about staying. “To look at the positives of it, how our community came together, that’s one of the reasons why I love the Appalachian mountains,” she said. “I’ve chosen to make these mountains my home because they mean so much to me and they really captured my heart.”

She spoke while paddling across the river, wearing gloves, waders, and a sun hat. Her small canoe carried a pile of trash bags and some trash grabbers; the sun was hot, and mounds of silt covered the tangled riverbanks where trees and businesses once stood. “Just a lot of uncertainty, a lot of fear, but then everyone else was in that same boat,” she said, jumping out of hers into waist-deep water. 

A few months after the storm, she started exploring the river and grabbing trash, keeping Excel spreadsheets detailing what she found and where, and what more needed to be removed. That work turned into the crew, and the possibility of something more permanent as destructive storms continue to wreak havoc on the mountains. Things are OK for now, she said, yanking a few pieces of twisted metal out of the brush. Besides, she’s used to improvising. All guides are. “That’s what you have to do in outdoor scenarios,” she said. “You have to think, ‘All right, well here’s plan A, how we think and we want things to go. Here’s plan B, if it doesn’t really go this way, then, oh crap, here’s plan C, if plan A and B just got thrown out the window.’”

Earlier this month, just as rafting season was getting in swing, the Pigeon’s wounds reopened. Four inches of rain doused western North Carolina, causing a rockslide on Interstate 40 and washing construction equipment into the river. All but the lowest reaches of the waterway is closed to rafting, and several put-in spots washed out.

Even before the water started to recede, raft guides once again piled into their boats to rescue neighbors, then set to work mucking out damaged houses and businesses. It was another blow to an industry, and a community, that is, in the words of one young guide, “getting some PTSD from the flood in September.”

As best as Heather Ellis can tell, no more than half the rafting companies in the Cocke County area have managed to reopen since Helene,, and some may not come back at all. She feels like one of the lucky ones, even if she is living in a camper until her new home is built.

After that May day on the Pigeon, she and two guide friends relaxed in front of her RV, watching the next group of lifejacket-clad tourists prepare to set out. Ellis started working here eight years ago, when she was 20, long enough that it started feeling like home. She recalled the moment her boyfriend called her to say Helene had taken their house. “It was heartbreaking,” she said.

In the months since, Ellis has found solace in growing more connected to the community, helping people rebuild, and getting to know the Pigeon River in its new form — exciting and frightening in equal measure. For Ellis and other guides, the only constant is the way these rivers change. 

“It kind of made me feel like a rookie again, cause I had to read water,” Ellis said. “That’s what we say when we’re just kind of seeing where the path needs to be, how we’re going to navigate down the river.”

Gerard Albert III contributed reporting to this story.