Hurricane Helene: Two Years After

A Tribute To The Resiliency Of The French Broad River

September 25, 2025
Colin Reis

I love rivers. I love fishing for the fish that swim in rivers. I’ve always been fascinated by knowing that no rock, fish, or piece of aquatic vegetation will ever encounter the same water twice - that every current is fleeting, passing through only once and then becoming a part of something else.

Two years ago, when Helene tore through Western North Carolina - the place my family, my parents, and my sister’s family all call home - I was terrified, first and foremost, for the people I loved, but also for the countless lives, both human and wild, that live in these mountains, rivers, and forests of Western North Carolina and East Tennessee.

Cell phone service dropped a few hours into the morning after the storm, and that felt really odd and concerning at the same time. I remember driving out of my neighborhood that morning to see if I could find any cell service anywhere - I couldn’t get far because of all the trees and debris scattered all over the roads. It looked like Armageddon had come through. I pulled into a nearby parking lot in front of a Sportsman’s Warehouse, and saw seven or eight other folks out of their vehicles, pointing their cell phones up to the sky. “Shit” I muttered to myself. “How am I going to reach my family?”

I came home and told my wife. We turned on the radio… hard to believe we actually had a radio somewhere in the house - Buncombe County had initiated a twice-daily broadcast, one at 10:00 am, the next at 2:00 pm. On the second day after the storm, I remember listening to the 11:00 am broadcast and someone from the Asheville police department came on. His voice was very somber, he started giving updates, and then he paused and said “The confirmed losses of life are 36”.... That’s when the gravity of the situation really hit me. I choked up. “36 people died??” You have to remember that, in those first few days, the rest of the world knew more about the devastation than most of us who were living through it did. We all know now that there were a lot more than 36 losses of life. Thankfully, I eventually learned that all of my family members were safe.

Okay… enough of the depressing recap. This blog isn’t about the devastation. It’s about what came after - the resilience of our communities, our rivers and wildlife, and their remarkable ability to recover.

While my disappointment over not being able to fish the French Broad for a while felt insignificant compared to the devastation surrounding it, I couldn’t help but feel bummed. Over the years, the French Broad had become my favorite place to fish - a river I had become very familiar with and had grown to love. MountainTrue organized a river cleanup around the River Arts District a week and a half after the storm. My friend and Feelfree Kayaks marketing colleague, Clay Lucas, and I decided to join. We pulled our boots and gloves on, masked up, and got to work. There was so much shit in the river, stuck in the trees and banks, in some places more than twenty feet above the water level. It was astounding, and hard to imagine the water level getting that high.

Trash anaconda

Didn't drink it...

Fruits of our labor

Second Gear, an outdoor consignment store that was located along the River Arts District in Asheville.

There is a section of river that flows right through downtown Asheville - the River Arts District - lots of businesses were located close to the riverbank in this section. One business in particular, Silver Line Plastics, which is owned by IPEX, was responsible for thousands of bundles of PVC pipes and plastics getting washed into the river from the storm. They stored massive amounts of PVC pipes right outside their facility, and the floodwaters lifted them and dumped them directly into the French Broad. MountainTrue reported that Silver Line’s plastic pipe accounted for nearly half of the material their crews have pulled out of the river; a lot of it traveled all the way down to Douglas Lake in East Tennessee - that’s 70 river miles.

MountainTrue’s French Broad Riverkeeper program deserves a lot of the credit for cleaning up the man-made debris that was dumped into the French Broad after the storm. “The French Broad River is an ecological, recreational, and economic powerhouse connecting western North Carolina and east Tennessee - regions already known for their abundance of incredible waterways. That's why when flooding caused by Hurricane Helene deposited vast amounts of trash and debris throughout its corridor, we knew that it needed special attention to ensure its recovery. In addition to the work accomplished by federal, state, and local governments, other non-profits, businesses, and individuals - MountainTrue's French Broad Riverkeeper program has leveraged new and existing resources to remove around 915,000 pounds of human-made debris in the past two years from 146 miles of the mainstem in Transylvania, Henderson, Buncombe, Madison, and Cocke counties. While we're certainly proud of what's been accomplished, there's still a long way to go and we'll keep at it until the entire river is cleaner than it was before the storm.” - Jack Henderson, French Broad Paddle Trail Manager.

Around three weeks after Helene, a couple of friends and I decided we couldn’t wait any longer and took my raft out on the river to see if we could find any fish. We decided on a section that was upstream of where most of the debris got washed into the river to avoid any chance of us running into something we didn’t want to. The water visibility was surprisingly clear, and we had to lower the raft down a steep embankment to launch, as most of the river access points were still closed. To say my optimism of finding fish was low would be an understatement. I was concerned about how many fish had actually survived the storm. How were they going to survive? Where would they go? Did they move up into tributaries or backwaters? Were some displaced? Within the first twenty minutes, my friend Chris answered that question for me and caught one of the biggest largemouth I’ve ever seen in the French Broad - there are largemouth in the river, but they are few and far between, smallmouth are a lot more common. When it surfaced, I couldn’t believe it. Considering everything that fish had endured to survive the storm, seeing it come to the surface was an incredible moment - a powerful reminder that fish, and rivers, have a way of enduring.

I started laughing, we all started laughing - pulling a larry out of the river was one thing, but a larry that size, and after the storm, was something completely unexpected. Shortly after that, we all started landing fish - nice fish, and our target species - smallmouth.  This was also unexpected, and the vibe in my boat went from being cautiously optimistic to downright elation.

Chris's Larry. October 19, 2024

I don’t want to give the impression that Helene somehow made the fishery better, because it certainly did not do that - the following spring and summer turned out to be some of the most difficult seasons I’ve experienced when it came to fishing the French Broad. The river was brown most of the summer due to all the sediment that had been stirred up from the storm, combined with the indiscriminate river cleanup efforts performed by the Army Corps of Engineers. Their contractors were paid by weight, meaning the more material they pulled out, the more money they received from the $2.5 billion awarded to the Army Corps from FEMA. They drove heavy machinery into the river for months, and pulled out significantly more natural material (fish habitat) than what was necessary for cleanup or flood control.

Despite dodging bulldozers in the river and the non-ideal water conditions, there were still some good days last summer - Clay and I took our Moken 10’s out and made the most of them when we could. One of the perks of working for a company that makes fishing kayaks is being able to go out and fish from them as part of the job. Clay does a pretty good job of taking pictures of it all too. 

Summer of 2025

The river certainly changed after Helene, sections of the riverbank had completely disappeared, old familiar structures were no longer there, new pools had developed, white PVC pipes were strewn about all over, and places where you were almost guaranteed to catch a fish no longer held fish, so we had to adapt and relearn how to find fish. I remember floating under some bridges and looking up to see logs and sticks jammed up in the structures holding the bridges up, these bridges are at least twenty feet above the water. We also had to find creative places to get in and out of the river as the public access points were closed and getting rebuilt for most of the spring and summer. Oftentimes, we’d come across the MountainTrue crews pulling rafts full of pipes and trash out of the river. On one trip, Clay told me he had spoken with one of the MountainTrue crew members who was cutting up pipes with a chainsaw that had embedded themselves in the river bottom, and cut through one pipe to find he had consequently cut a large catfish in half that had gotten stuck.

As the summer of 2025 gave way to winter, and then spring of 2026 I started to notice subtle changes in the river. These changes didn’t happen suddenly. There wasn't a particular day when I realized the river was starting to resemble how it used to be - it happened slowly, almost without me noticing at first.

The water clarity started to get a little better - it wasn’t turning brown or discolored for weeks or months at a time. Sure, the French Broad still gets discolored even today but it doesn’t seem to hold onto the brown color for as long. The amount of PVC pipe and debris was getting fewer and farther between - there is still some that you can see in areas, but it’s not nearly as much of an eyesore as it was for months after the storm. All that foreign material in the river and on the banks was depressing to see. Fish were chasing moving baits - baits that they hadn't seemed to eagerly want during the summer of 2025; flukes, chatterbaits, spinnerbaits, and top water stuff… Thank goodness for top water! The river started to feel somewhat familiar again.

Spring of 2026, both fish caught on flukes

Smallmouth are native to the French Broad, and they don't grow that quickly relative to largemouth or trout - a fifteen-inch fish could be twelve to fifteen years old. If you’re lucky enough to catch a twenty-inch smallmouth, that fish is likely twenty years old - you should respect and handle that fish with care. Smallmouth are survivors, aggressive predators, a native part of this ecosystem, and will fight pound-for-pound harder than any other freshwater fish we have.

Nowadays, each time I catch a nice smallmouth out of the French Broad, I can’t help but look at it a little differently. I wonder how old it is, what it did to survive Helene, was it displaced, or if it just held onto dear life and has always been in the same area?

The cleanup and restoration work done by organizations like MountainTrue played an important part in the river’s recovery, but there was something else happening - the river and wildlife in it were slowly finding a way to recover.

The French Broad isn’t the same river as it was before Helene, and in many ways, it probably never will be, but this is the nature of rivers. They are always changing, and they will never stay the same - Helene just changed it dramatically and all at once. The fish are still there, the water is still flowing, and life is finding a way to endure but in a different way than before.

What does it really mean to recover, in any sense? We might think of recovery as a way of returning to how things were, that if given enough time and effort, everything will be the same as it ever was. Life doesn’t really work that way. Trauma changes things. The same is true for rivers and wildlife. Recovery and resilience mean learning how to find a way to move forward, to move through it, like water.

Helene took a lot from this place, and the people and communities will never forget what was lost. These days, when I float down the river in my kayak or boat, watching the fleeting current pass through, I’m thankful for what endured.

Colin Reis
Feelfree Kayaks Director of Marketing and eCommerce