Looking Up in Chimney Rock

The fire chief recommended the sweet chili burger, and that was a solid call: heaping patty, topped with melted provolone and a thick slice of fried pineapple, all of it drizzled with a tangy red sauce. You have to reach the third page of the burger list at the RiverWatch Waterfront Bar & Grill to find this sucker, so I was glad for the guidance.

“That was probably one of the better feelings I’ve had in a long time, when RiverWatch opened back up,” said Chris Melton, chief of the Chimney Rock Volunteer Fire Department. The beloved restaurant held a soft reopening for locals on August 7, grilling burgers and frying up onion rings for the first time since Hurricane Helene wrecked the place last September. 

It marked something of a soft reopening for Chimney Rock, too—the first downtown restaurant to welcome back customers. “Everybody was together, just smiling and laughing, telling old jokes, telling stories, being able to talk about old times,” said Melton, who also serves as the assistant fire chief for neighboring Lake Lure. “Almost normal for a minute.”

Almost, because the view off the back deck of RiverWatch still includes piles of debris, a collapsed bridge, and a collection of heavy machinery. Almost, because most of the other businesses on Main Street are still closed or just plain gone, with rebuilding plans in limbo. Almost, because the Rocky Broad River, which used to be a tree-shaded, moss-dappled dose of mountain serenity, now flows through a blasted expanse of rock and sand, a constant reminder of last year’s catastrophe.

“That was 100 years of beauty we were looking at before,” said Kerry Ann White, referencing the century since the 1916 flood that also scoured and reshaped Chimney Rock, “and we took it for granted.”

White lives just across the river in a cottage built in the 1920s and set back high enough to escape Helene’s flooding. Several houses just across the street from hers were washed into the river. It took months to build a temporary bridge reconnecting her neighborhood to the rest of the world, allowing residents to return full-time.

She recalled idyllic scenes before the storm: tubing down the sleepy river under a canopy of shade, greeting neighbors on a “cocktail walk” down her street. “It’ll take another hundred years before it looks like that again,” she said. “I fell to my knees and bawled my eyes out the first time I came back and saw it like this.”

For White and so many others, grief and gratitude have intertwined in the months since Helene tore away much of the town and closed off what was left to the outside world. It’s only been a month since the town removed police barricades keeping nonresidents out, finally allowing a trickle of hardy tourists to see what’s become of the postcard scenery and cherished vacation spots. 

Chimney Rock State Park reopened to visitors on June 27, just after the Army Corps of Engineers got a temporary water treatment plant up and running, but the park is requiring reservations in order to keep traffic manageable as recovery work continues.

“Until then, we really kept people out because of the infrastructure,” said Melton. “We just weren’t ready. I feel like we still aren’t ready in some ways, but it’s good to see the roads being crazy with people again.”

Local Traffic Only 

The road through Chimney Rock is crazy, but in a different way than it was before. Pre-Helene, summer weekends were a tangle of minivans trying to back out of narrow parking spaces, motorcycles revving their way up the road to Bat Cave, and throngs of pedestrians navigating the patchwork sidewalks and grassy shoulders. 

Now, the crowds are thinner, construction fencing is the main obstacle to parking, and visitors can’t figure out if the newly installed, temporary road connecting Chimney Rock to Asheville is really open. 

“Can we ride that way?” asked a bearded gentleman on an orange Harley, peering at the “Closed—Local Traffic Only” signs marking where the old Main Street washed out and a new, sharply curving road has been installed atop a pile of rocks and gravel through the middle of the gorge. You can, I told him, but best to take it easy on the one-lane bridges. “Sounds fun!” he said before cranking the bike and pointing it west. 

He’s not wrong: The provisional road that engineers have plunked into the riverbed is a great drive. The boulder-strewn stretch of Hickory Nut Gorge between Chimney Rock and Bat Cave is an awesome, terrifying patch of scenery that includes wrecked houses still dangling above eroded cliffs and the remnants of landslides on both sides of the river.

But everyone is clearly figuring out the ethics and etiquette of inviting visitors back to a mountain oasis that is still very much a disaster area. I saw several people raise their phones to photograph some apocalyptic bit of destruction, only to hesitate and look around for affirmation that it was OK.

“It’s been a long, hard road for the town,” said Teresa Cauthren, who owns the Chimney Rock Inn with her husband, Glenn. “And it’s hard to come back to normal when you’re just not there yet.”

Like nearly every person I met in Chimney Rock, Teresa uses the word “magic” to describe the feeling of the place. She and her husband bought the inn after making a day trip to town in 2018, relocating from Florida to become the proprietors of a charming, old-school motel with cozy rooms and a porch filled with rocking chairs. 

By the grace of being on the far side of the road and a few feet uphill, the Chimney Rock Inn survived the storm. But across the road sit the ghostly shells of two other little inns now awaiting demolition after the storm eroded their foundations. The Cauthrens’ home along the river is a quiet ruin—still standing, but uninhabitable. They’ve been living in one of the motel cottages and haven’t decided whether to rebuild their house or accept a federal buyout that would require tearing it down and prohibit new development on the parcel. 

Teresa relishes the tighter sense of community since the storm, even as it coexists with lingering grief. “You work together, you cry together, you pray together,” she said. “I didn’t know that many people here before, and now we’re like family.” 

She’s also figuring out how to welcome guests looking for solace while she looks at her destroyed home directly across the street. “We put everything we had into this place,” she said. “And now we’ll have to do it again.”

The Lake Shall Rise Again—Eventually

Barely a mile down the road in Lake Lure, the sense of limbo is acute. Much of the idyllic lake that gives the town its name is currently an expanse of mud and fresh weeds, having been lowered more than 25 feet so that the Army Corps of Engineers can excavate the earth, rock, cars, trees, furniture, propane tanks, and other remnants of civilization that the storm washed downstream. 

Lake Lure’s town park has become a dump truck depot, with full rigs rattling their way down the narrow roads out of town 12 hours a day, seven days a week. As of mid-August, those trucks had carted more than a million tons of sediment and debris to a specialized landfill in Union County, South Carolina, nearly 70 miles away. 

“Whatever they’re doing, I just need them to get it done as fast as they possibly can,” said Mark Helms, who co-owns the Lake Lure Adventure Company with his wife, Genevieve. They sell fun on the water—boat rentals, wakeboarding lessons, guided fishing tours—which is difficult to do with no water. “Everything depends on the lake being open.”

Mark is wiry, fast-talking, full of energy. The first time I met him, a week after Helene, he was roving around in a doorless Jeep Wrangler, talking his way past police checkpoints and trying to help neighbors get back to their homes. His photo on the company website features him leaping, headlong, into Lake Lure. A year of idling the business has been tough on the family, both financially and mentally. 

“After the storm, I was ready to pack up and enroll the kids in soccer in Raleigh,” said Genevieve, standing at the kitchen counter of their home in a lakeside neighborhood. “But the kids said, ‘Hey, you chose to raise us here!’ They just wanted life to continue.” 

They’ve been trying to make it work, picking up odd jobs where they can. Mark hauled a boat to Florida for a client, while Genevieve has been checking on property for absent homeowners as they anxiously wait for the lake to return.

With no firm reopening date, vacation homes sit empty, and boats sit precariously on their lifts, dangling above cliffs of dried mud. The cove next to the Helms’ house is dry, with damaged kayaks still wedged into the lake bottom around a marooned dock. 

Mark has heard that the lake might start to refill in October, if the Army Corps maintains its pace. Officially, the town is more circumspect. “The lake restoration is a dynamic process,” reads an August update. “The Town of Lake Lure remains hopeful that we will be able to reopen the lake in 2026.”

Mark drove to a more elevated spot along the shore, offering a sweeping view of a waterless Town Cove and the fleet of excavators working the muddy bottom. “If we can get next summer—all of next summer—we can make it. But it better not rain on Memorial Day weekend,” he said with a laugh. “We need to have a very, very good season.

“For now, I’m just going to hang on and spend everything I’ve ever saved,” he continued. “And then we’ll have to start over and be happy about it.”

He pointed to the heaps of sediment in the lakebed. He recently learned that his 14-year-old son, Brody, had been sneaking out at dusk and riding his electric minibike through the muck, a practice very much discouraged by the federal agency currently in charge of the lake. 

Mark grinned, though he said he discouraged his son from continuing. “Even when it’s a disaster, they love this place.”

Magical Thinking

By Sunday afternoon, visitors were back at RiverWatch in force. The wait for an outside table had grown to an hour, and people were happy to hang around. 

“We had to come up for the reopening!” said Dawn Collins of Statesville, who arrived on the back of her husband Bryan’s Electra Glide Ultra Classic, a Harley touring bike. “RiverWatch is his favorite restaurant.” 

Bryan sang the praises of the veggie burger, which forced me to adjust my biker stereotypes. “They still do the original black bean burger,” he explained. “There used to be this place up in Mount Airy that had a better one, but then they switched to the Impossible Burger, which is garbage!” 

I asked Dawn what it felt like to be back in Chimney Rock for the first time since the storm. “It gives you goosebumps to see it like this,” she said. 

General manager Shelly McCormack hustled between tables, greeting locals by name and thanking families who’d made the drive. Couples sat along the edge of the back deck drinking Coronas. Small children begged parents for phones and iPads. Like the fire chief said, almost normal for a minute.

“We knew from the start we wanted to come back,” said McCormack, whose family owns RiverWatch, the coffee shop next door, and a still-wrecked novelty gem mine. “It’ll take years, but this place is going to be something special again.”

In the 11 months since Helene, there has been plenty of debate about the wisdom of coming back, of rebuilding on mountainsides and rivers that will inevitably collapse and flood again–whether that’s next year or next century. Much of the national coverage has been skeptical of plans to repair riverside homes and businesses, often accompanied by somber warnings of climate risks. 

In a PBS Frontline special in May, national correspondent Laura Sullivan warned about “an endless cycle of destruction and rebuilding” in storm-hit areas. In a July New Yorker feature, John Seabrook cited Helene’s impact and touted a new Vermont law that severely restricts private development along riverbanks. “Healthy rivers with free meander patterns” require communities to step back from the water’s edge, he wrote. 

There’s no way to drive the temporary road through Hickory Nut Gorge without marveling at the wildness and rawness of the place, without contemplating forces that have carved and recarved that gorgeous valley and will keep right on doing it, no matter what we build.

But for the people who love these mountains, residents and visitors alike, the policy debates and cost-benefit analyses can seem a little bloodless and detached. Chimney Rock is still a spectacularly beautiful place. People drive for hours and put their name on a waiting list to eat a chili burger beneath the high granite walls of Chimney Rock State Park; they visit for a day and decide to spend their life savings on a cute motel. They stack rocks and carve logs into gonzo shrines along the riverbank, because humans have always done that sort of thing.

“The people who are here to stay now, they’ve really got their heart in it,” said Josh Kerr, a woodcarver and chainsaw artist who works out of a shop along the river. “It’s not an easy decision now; you’ve really got to choose it.”

And plenty of people will. “It’s physically less beautiful right now but spiritually more beautiful,” said White, looking out from the porch of her century-old cottage. “There’s a deeper connection, a different level of grace.” 

And if the scale of the recovery gets to be too much, she said, “Just look up.” 

The view, as ever, is magical.

Jesse Barber contributed reporting.