Trees lie shattered along the Blue Ridge Parkway near Asheville, North Carolina. Ripped from the earth and sheared into jagged pieces after Hurricane Helene swept through the region, their sapwood now appears like bleached and broken bones.

“The wind damage northeast of Asheville is unfathomable,” wrote Evan Fisher, a local meteorologist who shared photos of the forest from late October. He described the Elk Mountain area, near the Parkway’s popular Craven Gap Trail, as “a hellish landscape, scarred for decades by Helene’s extreme winds.”

Fall is usually the peak season for the Parkway in western North Carolina. Throngs of tourists make the trek up from Asheville to see the carpet of colorful foliage that covers the Blue Ridge Mountains. The yearly pulse of activity has helped make the scenic roadway the most popular destination managed by the National Park Service, with well over 16.7 million visitors across both North Carolina and Virginia in 2023.

This year, the NPS spent that autumn peak just trying to make the Parkway passable. The first section of the 235 miles that run through North Carolina didn’t reopen until October 23, over three weeks after the storm, and the segment closest to Asheville remained inaccessible through November 6. Nearly 90 miles are still off-limits to the public in the aftermath of Helene.

While crews continue to clear and repair the road itself, longer-term questions remain about the forests that the Parkway traverses. The biodiverse landscape features five different ecosystems, including rare spruce-fir forest “sky islands” and grassy balds, and provides habitat for federally endangered species such as the Carolina northern flying squirrel, gray bat, and rock gnome lichen.

Before Parkway staff can begin to address forestry issues, says NPS spokesperson Naaman Horn, they’ll need to stabilize the roadway and finish their appraisal of the damage. He served as part of an incident management team drawing over 200 people from 47 other parks across the country, including drone pilots and landslide experts, that’s been helping local staff do that work. The Parkway’s initial estimates, released October 8, cited tens of thousands of downed trees and over 30 rock and mud slides; more-granular data hasn’t yet been released.

A landslide triggered by Hurricane Helene caused a complete collapse of the roadbed at Gooch Gap on the Blue Ridge Parkway. | Photo courtesy of NPS

Horn normally works in the NPS’s Intermountain Regional Office in Colorado and directed questions about ecological recovery to Parkway spokesperson Leesa Brandon. “Our early focus for in-park recovery has been restoring access to sections of the road where we were able to do so,” she responded to a Sierra inquiry. “In the coming months, we are likely to have more information related to your questions.”

But the US Forest Service, which manages the Pisgah National Forest surrounding much of the Parkway’s North Carolina mileage, shared a more detailed picture of impacts to the region’s public lands, finding “moderate to catastrophic damage” on over 187,000 wooded acres. About 117,000 acres of that vegetation were lost. “This is a recovery that will be measured in years,” said forest supervisor James Melonas.

Outside forestry experts echo that assessment. Andy Tait is the forestry director for EcoForesters, an Asheville-based nonprofit that promotes sustainable forest management throughout the Southern Appalachians. He calls Helene the single most damaging event for regional forests in recorded history. “Hurricanes do come through here every 20 years or so, but nothing to this scale,” Tait explains. “It was clearly a natural disaster on the human steroids of climate change. Just the amount of energy in the storm and the sheer size of it—both of those things were unparalleled.”

The human toll was similarly destructive. According to the latest tally from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, the storm killed at least 103 people in the state. Roughly a million residents lost power, many for weeks. The state Department of Transportation identified over 6,900 instances of road and bridge damage; once-thriving commercial areas like Asheville’s River Arts District, downtown Marshall, and the village of Chimney Rock were left in ruin.

While vegetation will inevitably return to the Parkway and other impacted areas, Tait is concerned that, without proper management, the forests that do grow back could look very different than before. He points out that shrubby, invasive species like multiflora rose, autumn olive, and privet have established an understory presence across much of the region.

Fallen vegetation on the Blue Ridge Parkway on October 20. | Photo by David Ammen/NPS

After the fall of mature canopy trees such as white and red oaks, Tait explains, those invasives often spread into the newly opened space in dense stands that keep more desirable native trees from regenerating. The risk is particularly acute in landslide areas, where invasive species can quickly colonize bare soil and prevent native species from gaining a foothold.

The Parkway’s forests might also be more susceptible to wildfires in the years to come, thanks to the countless downed trees that now represent fuel. The North Carolina Climate Science Report, compiled by researchers at North Carolina State University and the National Centers for Environmental Information, notes that climate change is already causing a backdrop of more frequent and severe fires in western North Carolina. “My dad used to say he managed by benign neglect: Let nature take care of itself,” Tait says. “That might have worked 50 years ago, but now we are so far past that. We’re seeing things beyond any truly natural scale here.”

Interventions to shape a healthier forest recovery include salvage logging of fallen trees, replanting disturbed ground with native species, and manually controlling invasives. But that work can be costly and labor intensive, and given the Parkway’s pressing need for road repairs, it may be less of a funding priority.

Carolyn Ward is the CEO of the Blue Ridge Parkway Foundation, the park’s nonprofit fundraising partner. She says Parkway officials don’t yet know how much support they’ll receive from the federal government, but she anticipates most of that money will be designated for the road itself, as was the case for more than $200 million allocated by 2020’s Great American Outdoors Act. (The Parkway’s overall deferred maintenance backlog exceeds $449 million.)

“If you don’t have the motor road open and accessible, then you can’t get to the visitor amenities or the trails,” she points out. “It’s not that the park doesn’t care about the other things, it’s that there is an order of access.”

Some emergency funding has already started to flow to the Parkway: The Federal Highway Administration provided $25 million for emergency road work on November 8. But it’s unclear what other federal backing for the park may come.

The Helene Recovery Support Act, filed earlier this month by Republican representative Virginia Foxx of Banner Elk, North Carolina, would allocate $12.5 billion to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and $1.5 billion to the Small Business Administration, but nothing to the NPS or Forest Service. Neither Foxx nor Republican representative Chuck Edwards—the two House members whose districts cover the Parkway’s North Carolina stretch—responded to requests for comment.

Ward says her group has helped support forestry efforts along the Parkway in the past, including invasive species removal and pest control for the hemlock woolly adelgid. Private money could help plug some of the funding gap for ecological restoration; she says donations have been strong, with many first-time donors chipping in.

Yet Ward suggests that, to some extent, the region will have to reckon with the reality that the Parkway will never be quite the same.

“We don’t typically get to witness geologic change the way that we did with Hurricane Helene. It’s shocking for us to see the tree damage, and to see the rivers now in that place versus this place,” she says. “But the landscape does change over time; it does move. Things do evolve.”