"There’s a tranquility to western North Carolina’s forests. The quiet here is part of the reason Leo Temko and Janice Barnes chose a hillside northeast of Asheville as an escape from New York City, where they spend half their time.
Mountainsides draped in the green of tulip poplar, oak and hickory lure people by the thousands: retirees and campers, naturalists and adventurers. But serenity was shattered when Hurricane Helene blasted through with extreme winds on Sept. 27. Days of rain had soaked the soils, which made trees on steep slopes more vulnerable when Helene arrived.
Helene caused catastrophic damage across about a fifth of the region’s million-acre federally protected forests, according to the North Carolina Forest Service. Satellite data analyzed by the U.S. Forest Service’s Southern Research Station shows damage extends for more than 200 miles through the southern Appalachians."
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