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Behind the two-story wooden office building and gift shop of the Hot Springs Resort & Spa is a moonscape. Mounds of sand at least 10 feet high and craters 15 feet deep scar a landscape once lush with trees and flowering bushes.
In a town of slightly more than 5oo residents, the 103-acre resort drew an average of 70,000 visitors annually, including hundreds of Appalachian Trail hikers. Then Hurricane Helene blasted through in late September 2024, leaving the resort and Hot Springs’ tiny downtown in ruins. While locals are grateful they lost no one in the floods, the businesses in the tourism-dependent town are still struggling to reopen more than three months later.
The flooding washed 13 of the resort’s 17 cabanas and their jetted hot tubs into the French Broad River. The raging waters annihilated the main spring and pump system that carried the state’s only natural mineral water across Spring Creek and into the hot tubs–a big attraction for weary hikers. The resort’s campground, six overnight guest suites, and six cabins are gone, too.
Armies of volunteers–a mix of regional folks and people who traveled from afar in organized groups–descended at the confluence of Spring Creek and the French Broad to help haul debris, pick up trash, and rebuild the pump house. “They give us hope,” said general manager Heather West.
The resort was an economic linchpin for Hot Springs, and its reopening is critical to the survival of a town West, 44, described as a “wide spot on the road” when she was growing up. Her family has lived in Hot Springs for five generations.
Just as crucial are the twin tasks of revitalizing Hot Springs’ deluged downtown and letting prospective Appalachian Trail thru-hikers know there will be walkarounds, so they can avoid the 10 remaining impassable miles of storm-damaged trail north of Hot Springs. Those walkarounds will be on other trails, on two-lane roads, and on rarely used U.S. Forest Service roads. The 2,200-mile trail runs along the sidewalk along Bridge Street in Hot Springs.
As much as the town relies economically on thousands of backpackers and day hikers who pass through each year, hikers have depended on Hot Springs since the trail was first mapped in 1932–as a place to rest, shower, eat, and resupply. It’s the first town that thru-hikers leaving from Springer Mountain, Georgia, walk through going northbound.
They will still find essentials this spring, even if not every business is open, said Wayne Crosby, owner of Bluff Mountain Outfitters. “This is still the first town,” he said. “And even if part of the town is not here, they’re carrying their homes on their back. So they just need a place to get a good breakfast and resupply.
Crosby, 56, had to relocate and rebuild his 27-year-old business after a seven-foot wall of water blew out the two-story store’s back wall and surged into the front, destroying most of his inventory, an ATM, and a 500-pound antique scale. Crosby said he hopes his new, smaller store in a vacant building that once housed a Forest Service office will be ready for the thru-hiking season this spring.
Some indispensable businesses are still open, including the Smoky Mountain Diner, with its iconic skillet breakfasts; a Dollar General; Sara Jo’s Station, which sells gas along with convenience foods and locally made crafts; and the Hillbilly Market and Deli. “We are strong. We are overcomers,” said diner owner Genia Hayes Peterson, 61.
Backpackers account for “easily half” her business, she said. The diner lost electricity for 12 days after Helene and $9,000 worth of food. But she was able to reopen after 10 days.
Business owners agree that by April, when hundreds of thru-hikers begin showing up in Hot Springs, the town will be ready. Hikers visit year-round, with the peak season being between April and June.
A Destination for Hikers
Against a constant stream of cars and trucks detouring through town from a washed-out section of I-40, workers are salvaging buildings that were covered in muck and mud and fixing the busted wastewater pipes.
Close to an A.T. trailhead and about a mile from the resort, the town’s largest hostel, Laughing Heart, is closed. The former Jesuit retreat center did not suffer significant damage last fall, but it was already shut for planned renovations when the storm hit. It won’t be open for the 2025 hiker season.
“All the contractors that were going to start on their project got pulled to other places because of the flood,” said Hot Springs Mayor Abby Norton, 65, from her makeshift office in the resort’s main building. Town Hall was relocated there after flooding destroyed the government offices on Bridge Street.
Townspeople are scrambling to figure out where the hundreds of thru-hikers are going to sleep. There is some talk of a resident with a large tract of land installing tent platforms, or perhaps leasing out rooms in a large, empty home. “We really, desperately need a place for hikers to stay,” said diner owner Peterson.
The municipal wastewater treatment plant, built on the French Broad floodplain in 1968, was flooded. The aging system was already operating over capacity and in need of replacing before Helene. The flooding destroyed one of the town’s four pump stations, and it took until December 10 for businesses east of Spring Creek, which splits downtown, to have functioning toilets.
Peerless Blowers, which at its peak employed 78 people, had already decided to shut down its manufacturing plant before Helene. It closed for good on December 12. Efforts to reach the company were not successful. Norton said the wastewater issues were not the reason the company closed the plant and that she isn’t sure why. “They don’t talk to me either,” she said.
Amy Rubin and her husband, Chris Donochod, both 52, opened Big Pillow Brewing on Christmas Day 2020. They named it after a rapid on the French Broad, where Donochod was a raft guide, and its karaoke and trivia nights had been a lively gathering spot for locals and backpackers alike.
The couple was able to reopen its event space and outdoor biergarten this Christmas, with a community potluck that nearly 200 people attended. But the couple is still repairing the taproom and brewery.
On the Trail Again
While a standard A.T. thru-hike means heading from Georgia to Maine, volunteer trail maintainers along the North Carolina border with Tennessee currently recommend thru-hikers get off the trail about 40 miles north of Hot Springs, skip ahead to undamaged sections, and return when the trail or walkarounds are ready.
It will be extremely difficult for hikers to return to that portion until it’s been cleared of the root balls and piles of fallen trees as high as 15 feet, currently making it impassable.
In some places, tornadic winds lifted trees from their roots, creating deep cavities. In what’s referred to as a “cascade ball,” winds blew apart the top of ridgelines, pushing trees on top of each other. At least six shelters and camping spots where the trail hugs the state border were either destroyed or severely damaged, said Joe Morris, 62, who coordinates crews of trail maintainers for the Tennessee Eastman Hiking and Canoeing Club.
The epicenter of damages lies near Iron Mountain Gap, straddling the line between North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest and Tennessee’s Cherokee National Forest. Here, the A.T. vanishes under a cascade of hundreds of fallen oaks and other hardwoods, including some trees marked with white blazes—those rectangles of white paint that let hikers know they’re on the right path. With temperatures below freezing and snow falling on a recent morning, Morris trudged through six inches of snow on a U.S. Forest Service road, paralleling the trail to assess the damage.
A full day of work can yield as little as one-tenth of a mile of cleared trail, Morris said, but even that is getting harder as the months go by. “Once winter really sets in, we will shut down due to accumulating snow.”
Franklin Tate, a regional director for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which coordinates maintenance and also supplies its own crews, said crews are clearing trail almost daily, but it’s unlikely the whole section will be hikeable by spring.
Tate said he doesn’t want backpackers to cancel their thru-hikes, but instead be more flexible with their itineraries–perhaps skipping damaged sections until they can be repaired. “The volunteers, the ATC, and the Forest Service are figuring out what that walkaround looks like in the area,” he said.
If hundreds of backpackers opt to ignore walkarounds and instead attempt to traverse the small section of damaged trail north of Hot Springs, that would make it next to impossible for repair to continue, Morris said. “With all due respect, it would be better if people could figure out alternative plans” north of Hot Springs. “We need to be unencumbered to fix [the trail].”
When this spring’s trekkers enter Hot Springs, it will be on the same footpath that Earl V. Shaffer took on the first recorded thru-hike in 1948. While they will find a business district that isn’t as vital as it was before Helene, there will still be much more to offer than 77 years ago.
“This is still the first town, even if part of the town is not here,” said Crosby. “They will adapt and they’ll figure it out.”
Hot Springs has survived hardships before, West said, including the Great Flood of 1916, which killed 12 people, and a deadly typhoid fever outbreak in 1918.
With Helene, “we didn’t lose people here in Hot Springs,” she said. “We lost things. Things are replaceable. Humans are going to have to replace things.”
Allison Salerno is an independent multimedia journalist who also is an avid Appalachian Trail backpacker. Among other places, her work has appeared in The Washington Post, the New York Times and on America Test Kitchen’s podcast, Proof. She won an award in 2024 from the National Association of Hispanic Journalists for her coverage of Venezuelan asylum seekers traveling through Georgia.