Kim Trevathan is Compass’ outdoors columnist. He is the author of several books and a 2019 inductee into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame, and a retired professor of writing and communication at Maryville College. He recently moved to Asheville, N.C.

I’ve had trouble answering people who ask me how Asheville is doing these days, about two months after Hurricane Helene laid waste to the region.

So far, cleanups have focused on clearing river access points.

I start on a personal level and say we did fine, no property damage, no flooding on our street. On Nov. 18, the City of Asheville said our tap water was safe to drink.

Others weren’t so lucky, I’m always quick to add. And then it becomes daunting to try to cover the causes, scale, and variety of death, ruin, and devastation, as well as the status of recovery efforts.

What I can do is offer a glimpse into one part of the recovery — cleaning up rivers and riverbanks — what it feels and smells and looks like on a post-Helene river cleanup, and what can be learned about disaster among debris near and on the water.

I participated in two cleanups run by MountainTrue, a nonprofit organization that has advocated for clean water, land, and air in Western North Carolina since 1982. It is the parent organization of the French Broad Riverkeeper, as well as the riverkeeper programs of the Broad, Green, and Wautauga rivers.

I focused on what runs through the heart of Asheville, the much maligned and celebrated French Broad, what historian Wilma Dykeman called “the classic example of an Appalachian mountain river.”

As Dykeman chronicles in her 1955 book The French Broad, the river suffered so much abuse by 20th century industry and people who dumped trash in it that parts were almost devoid of life. It stank of chemicals and sewage. 

Then, partly because of the awareness raised by Dykeman’s book, people began to realize that a cleaner, accessible river was not only important for physical and spiritual health but offered economic opportunity as well.

In a 2018 WNC Magazine article, Jack Igelman tracked the “current boom” of the renewed urban river back to the late 1980s. In 2018, he said, “it’s hard to keep track of the new restaurants, housing, and creative projects” thriving in the River Arts District.

In that same magazine, an article by John E. Ross in summer 2024 detailed robust economic growth and enhancements along the riverfront from Asheville to Marshall, including greenways, housing, and the potential removal of Craggy Dam.

Helene has altered the trajectory of this boom.

Arden Cleanup

The parking lot was full when Beth and I got to Glen Bridge River Park, near Arden, upstream of Asheville at River Mile 55. Cornfields flanked each bank, and the French Broad had harvested some of the crop.

Debris clinging to the upper branches of trees are evidence of the flood level on the French Broad River. (Beth Griffin photo.)

I dropped the canoe near the river and parked a quarter mile away. Jack Henderson, the French Broad Paddle Trail manager, directed us to focus on the far side of the river, more difficult for volunteers on foot to access.

The MountainTrue river cleanups at Arden, Alexander (just downstream of  Asheville at Mile 83), and Marshall (Mile 95) were focused on cleaning up around the put-ins for the French Broad Paddle Trail, Henderson said.

The paddle trail runs from Rosman, N.C., near the river’s headwaters, to Newport, Tenn. Paddle trail staff and partners create and maintain public access, including the removal of garbage from access points and larger debris from the river itself.

Henderson articulated the greater mission of this round of post-Helene cleanups: “Our goal is to help our local land managers re-open these riverside parks and public access points so that residents and visitors have a safe place to be by and/or get on the river.”

Up a Creek

Beth and I paddled hard against the current to the mouth of Avery Creek. From 300 yards away, where we launched, we could see some large-scale trash on the bank. There were only three other volunteers in boats: a father and son in a johnboat, and a kayaker.

Angling across a shoal toward the creek mouth, I worried about falling into this water. Riverkeeper Hartwell Carson had been testing different parts of the river for chemicals and E.coli, generally finding that river pollution since Helene wasn’t as dire as expected.

Henderson said it was fortunate for the river that the wastewater treatment plant in Asheville stayed intact and operational.

At the same time, MountainTrue recommended rubber boots, long pants, long-sleeved shirts, rubber gloves, N95 masks, and goggles or safety glasses. They suggest volunteers take a shower soon after participating in a cleanup.

Because of likely “higher levels of pollutants and contaminants … it’s important to take the necessary precautions to protect yourself,” says the MountainTrue website.

In the stern, I steered Beth, up front, toward our first pickup: two sections of an artificial Christmas tree, a metal rendering of a pastoral holiday scene, and other decorative trinkets. 

A kayaker named Dean, upstream of us in the creek, was stacking junk on his deck. “Do you want some coffee?” he yelled at us. “I just found a Keurig thermos.”

Main River Cleanup

Turning downstream onto the main river, we were gathering the kind of stuff one usually sees on river cleanups: shreds of plastic and other synthetic materials festooning the trees and thorn bushes. 

The author removing trash entangled in branches along the French Broad River. (Beth Griffin photo.)

Against my advice, Beth stood up to snatch a large swatch fluttering like a flag. High above us — two lengths of my 16-foot canoe — hung trash that indicated the height of the floodwaters, hard to imagine on this warm day under blue skies.

The father in the johnboat shouted at us: “Need a seat?” I turned, a little annoyed, thinking he was ridiculing my 30-plus year-old canoe. They showed us a sturdy wooden bench they had salvaged.

My prize: a plastic lawn chair that I freed from an underwater tangle. Kayaker Dean extricated a tricycle.

Sometimes, when we reached up to jerk free trash from the riparian bank, dirt would rain down on us, and the disturbance of what had recently been underwater stirred up some pungent, unidentifiable odors.

One takeaway from this cleanup that made it different from others. We were not just finding what negligence and routine circumstance washed or blew into the river; we were gathering the valuable objects of people’s lives that Helene had taken from their yards, storerooms, and houses.

Henderson said the most unusual thing he found that day was a couch. “Wild to think it floated down the river,” he said. “Wonder how it got there.”

He was “stoked” that 40 volunteers turned out. He said it would have been more had he not limited the signup because of parking availability. Henderson estimated that we gathered “over 50 bags of trash and thousands of pounds of loose debris (lumber, furniture, tires, etc.).”

Redmon Dam Cleanup

Steady cold rain fell all morning at the next cleanup on Nov. 14, and only about half of the 20 signed-up volunteers showed up.

We stood on a sloped shore of rocky, uneven terrain downstream of the waterfall that plunged over Redmon Dam, roaring so loud we had to shout to be understood. Below the dam, the river flowed fast and shallow toward the famous whitewater Section 9, five miles away.

The dam, finished in 1911, is 37 feet high, 583 feet across. It’s a run-of-the-river dam, meaning that water flows over it at normal levels, like today, and that it does not provide flood control.

Henderson told me that the floodwaters had reached the railroad 40 feet above where we were standing on the shore. The dam was breached on river right (our side), where the floodwaters damaged two structures, part of a bypass channel used as a fish ladder.

Across the river from us, below a wooded ridge, squatted a small powerhouse and generating station, swarming with contractors toiling away at the dam’s working parts.

On our side, chunks of the narrow riverside road had been washed away, and on the rocky riverside below the railroad tracks, where people launched boats, bushes and trees leaned hard downstream, their limbs drooping with debris.

A woman pulled up in a car with a canoe on top, a Buffalo, which I’d never heard of. This was Leslie Beninato, owner of Asheville Canoe House, a canoe rental company. She wasn’t going to launch her boat today, she said, laughing a little. She just hadn’t taken the time to unload it.

Beninato had a stake in a clean river. The entire morning, under the steady rain, she attacked what Helene had left behind, from small pieces of plastic she snatched with both hands to heavy rebar, concrete, barbed wire, and cable we hauled from the water.

Ruins of the fish ladder pump station at Redmon Dam on the French Broad River. (Kim Trevathan photo.)

Part of a chain link fence had washed from the dam 50 yards away. It took four of us to extricate it and carry it to the side of the road. There was a network of rebar that five of us carried from the water to the roadside. That these heavy pieces had been broken off from the dam’s structures and washed away so far was another testament to the incredible power of the flood.

We were two miles downstream of Marshall, a community devastated by the flooding, and we were finding debris that marked human loss: a winter jacket and other clothing, furniture, and a teddy bear.

I’d participated in a cleanup in downtown Marshall several days after the storm. The social media post said they needed help shoveling mud and picking up debris. Easy, I thought.

Four hours into the work, wearing a white Tyvek suit, with hood, rubber boots, a respirator, goggles, two layers of gloves, and hard hat, I realized I needed to take the shuttle back up to the staging area and turn in my outfit. I was overheated, dehydrated, and my back was killing me. 

The mud we were loading into buckets and wheelbarrows from inside a partially collapsed structure weighed more than anything I’d ever tried to shovel. Sludge was a more accurate word for what the floodwater left behind, much of it festooned with cardboard that made it difficult to load on a shovel blade. It reeked of whatever had washed into the river during the flood — oil, chemicals, fecal matter, and so on.

This is something that went on day after day for weeks, an ongoing outpouring of positive energy. This was hard, hard work that nobody was shirking from.

Same vibe at the cleanup below the dam. The volunteers were hard-core veterans of cleanups, people who knew and loved the river.

They were descending steep, rocky banks like goats to stuff unspeakable things into garbage bags. One of the first things I found was a diaper. There was other underwear; I declared myself king of underwear finders, and nobody argued. Or laughed.

Since the storm, Henderson said, he’d paddled or driven along most of the river, assessing damage. He said that the river itself was navigable, that there were no “full obstructions” of woody debris or garbage blocking it. 

The next stage of the river cleanup, he said, after the initial pickups at the access points, was to get people on the river in boats to clean up. He planned on recruiting from the rafting guides in the area.

Near the end of our cleanup, when everyone was soaked and grimy and probably a little chilled, like me, Beninato remarked that it felt good to accomplish what we had. There was plenty of trash remaining — some of it that would require machinery, some of it too high for us to reach.

But you could tell we’d restored some of the place’s natural beauty and made it safer for visitors. Henderson estimated that the river would be safe for the public to paddle by spring.

The French Broad, Henderson said, “is central to many of our residents’ ways of life, our region’s economy, and our cultural identity.” Cleaning it up “is integral to returning to a relative feeling of normalcy, alongside boosting our community’s pride and sense of place.”

Much Work Remains

Cleanups on and around the French Broad and other waterways, as well as assessment and testing, have been going on since Helene hit in late September. The French Broad Riverkeeper Instagram (@fbriverkeeper) documents those efforts, reporting on Nov. 12 that test results for pollutants were “overwhelmingly good.”

The author with his loaded canoe on the French Broad River. (Beth Griffin photo.)

“Out of 185 chemical pollutants we tested for, almost none” showed up in the samples, the organization said. Good news for the river, so far, but monitoring of it continues, as do cleanups of more visible damage and pollution.

So, back to the question: how is Asheville doing now?

The city suffered $1.8 billion in damages, according to Mayor Esther Manheimer in the Asheville Explainer. She wonders what it’s going to take to get Asheville “back on track.”

French Broad Riverkeeper images from the Swannanoa on Nov. 16 show large-scale debris such as vehicles, buildings, and dumpsters choking this river, which joins the French Broad in Asheville around Mile 69, upstream of the River Arts District.

Cleaning up this mess, as French Broad Riverkeeper Hartwell Carson has pointed out, will take money, time, machinery, and outside expertise, such as governmental agencies like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could provide.

What Carson calls the “Big Cleanup” will “require millions of dollars in state investment.” He emphasizes the need for immediate action.

Carson is asking for people to email North Carolina legislators requesting a hurricane relief package. We should find out soon if the rivers of Western North Carolina like the French Broad — what Henderson calls the “lifeblood” of the area — will get the help they need.