Swaths of downed timber are a common sight throughout Western North Carolina after Tropical Storm Helene, even a year later. Near Roan High Knob, along the North Carolina-Tennessee state line in Mitchell County, 100-mile-per-hour winds uprooted and shredded hundreds of trees, leaving a 25-acre patch of the high-elevation spruce-fir forest floor a tangle of roots and splintered trunks.
“It was just flattened,” said Appalachian Trail Conservancy associate director of science and stewardship Matt Drury. “It’s as bad as anywhere I’ve seen.”
What sets this swath of blowdown apart is that Helene’s gale-force winds ripped through one of the Southern Appalachians’ rarest ecosystems: a spruce-fir forest. Researchers and conservationists say the storm not only destroyed between 10% and 20% of the 2,000-acre canopy dominated by red spruce, but created conditions ripe for threats from wildfire, invasive plants and exotic pests that could reverse years of investment and restoration.
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The Roan Highlands include tens of thousands of acres that stretch across a series of high-elevation peaks bisected by the Appalachian National Scenic Trail and protected by public lands and private conservation easements.
The area is a focus of the Southern Appalachian Spruce Restoration Initiative, a coalition of nonprofits and agencies formed in 2013 to restore the region’s spruce-fir forests. Partners include the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, Southern Highlands Reserve, The Nature Conservancy, the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission and the USDA Forest Service. Together, they’ve built seed banks, mapped priority sites, managed invasive species and launched planting projects across Western North Carolina and East Tennessee.
Because of the unique forest and stunning views, the Roan Highlands is one of the most iconic stretches of the 2,197-mile-long Appalachian Trail.
“It’s like walking into a different room in the forest,” Drury said. “It’s dark and damp; it looks different; it smells different. It’s really unique.”
Spruce-fir forests are also critical habitat for species such as the Carolina northern flying squirrels, the northern saw-whet owl and the world’s smallest tarantula — the federally endangered spruce-fir moss spider. Each is adapted to short growing seasons and the cool, moist conditions of the Roan.
The spruce-fir are relics of the last ice age, when cold-adapted plants and animals spread south. As glaciers retreated, they were stranded on the tallest peaks. Marquette Crockett, the Roan stewardship director of the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy, described the patches of threatened spruce-fir forests to CPP in 2022 as “tiny little droplets” on the landscape.
These islands are shrinking. In North Carolina and Tennessee, about 70,000 acres of spruce-fir forest survive in scattered patches on Mount Mitchell, Grandfather Mountain, the Balsam Range, the Roan Highlands and a handful of others.
Over the last century, the range of the spruce-fir forest has been hammered by logging, road building, grazing, wildfires and increasing pressure from threats associated with a warming climate.
“Spruce grows slowly,” Crockett said. “So once the spruce was logged, hardwoods sprouted up in their place. Especially at relatively lower elevations, spruce just lost the battle.”
Despite the obstacles, conservationists and land managers see hope. Linking isolated red spruce patches and protecting new plantings gives the species more space to adapt as the climate warms.
The work to protect the forest, Crockett said, is urgent.
“These forests won’t come back on their own,” she said. “If we want future generations to see them and the wildlife that depends on them, we have to act now.”
Added risks for spruce-fir forest
The open patch of forest on the Roan’s southern slope once covered in conifers and toppled by Helene, is more vulnerable to the spread of nonnative plant species. The canopy loss created open, sunny conditions, ideal for the rapid advance of invasive plants, such as Chinese silver grass, whose windborne seeds can also catch a ride in a pickup bed, tire treads or a shoe sole.
The proliferation of invasive species puts the special ecological functionality of the forest at risk and can potentially crowd out the once dominant spruce-fir forest, Drury said. “That’s what really makes me lose sleep.”
In fact, the spruce-fir forest has already been impacted by the lethal balsam woolly adelgid. The pest was first spotted on Mount Mitchell in 1957, imported from Europe decades earlier. The adelgid has a disastrous impact on Fraser firs, stunting the tree at a modest height before it eventually succumbs to the insect.
A warmer climate, changing rainfall patterns and a longer growing season are expected to accelerate the impact of harmful insects and the spread of invasive plants. As a result, it’s harder to restore these unique islands of habitat as red spruce cede ground to hardwoods and other plants and shrubs.
Another risk is wildfire.
Spruce-fir forests are pyrophobic, meaning they seldom burn and can snuff out a spreading wildfire when it reaches their damp, moisture-rich conditions. But once the canopy is gone and the landscape is exposed to sunlight, “it’s a whole different ball game,” Drury said.
Fraser firs, for example, burn hot. As firs are exposed to warmer, drier conditions, they become more flammable. At Roan’s high elevations, frequent strong winds can drive wildfires to spread through storm debris and vegetation, such as silver grass, which grows thick on roadsides and can carry fire into the canopy.
Drury worries that conditions are now ripe for a wildfire.
Intense blazes can leave a mark for decades. Fires to clear slash from industrial logging operations in the early 20th century burned with such intensity that it transformed the soil chemistry, Drury said. Black Balsam in Transylvania County is one example. Its spruce-fir forest was transformed into a grasslands and shrub field, unable to support the spruce-fir forest.
“There are seven focal areas of Appalachian spruce-fir, and this is one of the most important ones,” Drury said. “It’s not just losing the trees, it’s losing everything that depends on them: the flying squirrels, the moss spider, the pygmy salamanders” and a host of other threatened and endangered plants and animals.
Human response
In the winter of 2024-25, conservationists surveyed the damage from Helene and began shaping a recovery plan. One key step was the USDA Forest Service imposing a six-month fire ban, later extended to five years.
“We had a group consensus that we actually needed to get some of this material off site,” Drury said. “It is a threat, and once the general public gets in here, it could be catastrophic.”
The majority of wildfires can be traced to one source: people. Among the ignition sources are fireworks, unattended campfires, discarded cigarettes, escaped residential brushfires, burning leaves and brush piles.
The best restoration strategy would have been a phased removal of forest debris, especially in portions of the blowdown adjacent to spots heavily used by the public, such as the Cloudland parking lot within the Roan Mountain Day Use Area, Drury said. Instead, the entire 25-acre patch of tree fall was addressed in a single treatment using a U.S. Forest Service contractor.
Two partners associated with the red spruce restoration initiative told CPP that they were concerned that too much woody debris was removed from the site and the operation left tracks from heavy equipment.
Drury acknowledged that the project wasn’t perfect.
“We’re not out there to fix everything,” Drury said. “We want the site to be messy. We want it complex. The reason the restoration was prioritized is because that core acreage is in an area of heavy human use and there’s an elevated risk of a catastrophic fire.”
He credited the Forest Service’s commitment to red spruce restoration, which has built capacity and allowed the coalition to complete projects on a larger scale. “While it didn’t shake out exactly as planned, the project was ultimately successful in decreasing the fire risk,” he said.
A spokesperson for the USDA Forest Service told CPP in an email that the agency’s salvage operation was intended “to remove debris and downed trees from the Roan Highlands area out of concern for public safety and the surrounding spruce-fir ecosystem.”
The National Interagency Fire Center forecasted Western North Carolina to have a higher risk of wildfire from October through December in 2025, heightened by ground conditions created by Helene.
“By taking action prior to the fall season in this small area, we can prevent a potentially devastating wildfire,” the Forest Service said. “The removal of the hazardous fuels along the roads and trails on Roan Mountain has created defensible space for firefighting activities, hazardous fuel load reduction, and to protect the recreating public from catastrophic wildfire.”
Now, one year after Helene, partners are focused on long-range plans to restore and protect the forest transformed by the storm.
On Sept. 13, three dozen volunteers joined the “Free the Fir” work day, clearing debris to rescue roughly 1,200 young spruce seedlings and saplings, providing remaining trees within the devastated forest a crucial step up.
Crews intend to plant another 4,000 trees in the coming months and will continue monitoring growth and invasive species over the next five years.
“There are areas where you’ll see little baby trees, mountain ash and red elderberry. And so there’s some areas where regeneration is already happening,” Drury said, acknowledging the timeframe for the return of a healthy red spruce forest isn’t measured in years, but in decades.
Near the edge of a recently cleared field, a lone spruce sapling, its small green crown drooping slightly from the weight of its bright green needles, stands among scattered stumps and fallen logs.
Drury said the tree’s survival is a hopeful sign and the first step in a long road to recovery.
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