This month I am going to set aside my usual focus of life in retirement to help celebrate the long-awaited reopening of Lake Lure. Hurricane Helene brought incredible devastation to this area in late September of 2024 and it seems nothing short of a miracle to see how far we have come in about a year and a half.
We watched the lake recover from our home on the lake’s southern shore. The view out of our front window is of towering mountain ranges and the middle of the lake where all the branches of the lake cross. We can see down the branch of the lake that ends at Morse Park and the town. That view remained beautiful and unchanged throughout the whole time if you just looked up and not at the lake itself. Sunsets and sunrises continued to delight and inspire hope that Lake Lure would return to normal someday.
In the first days after the storm, the water was the color of chocolate milk. There was so much debris in the water we joked we could probably walk across on top of it to the other side of the lake. Depending on the time of day and the direction of the wind, random objects floated up to our shore, floated on and then floated back. We saw telephone poles, entire trees, garage doors and parts of roofs – all remnants of people’s lives from upstream as far away as Asheville and certainly much debris from Chimney Rock. Anything that had been inside someone’s boathouse also floated away and joined the parade– floats, skis, life preservers and plastic chairs. The town of Lake Lure did a great job identifying any boats, kayaks and canoes that had registration numbers and getting them back to their owners. No one has been allowed on the lake except authorized personnel.
Almost immediately a parade of tugboats and barges began. They ran from sunup to sundown seven days a week. Empty barges would head out and come back piled high with logs and debris. Truck after truck carried the piles away. Over 100,000 cubic yards of debris had to be removed. We wondered where they were taking all that stuff.
In June of 2025, the lake was lowered by approximately 30 feet to allow heavy machinery to start working on removing silt and debris from the coves and marinas. The color of the lake was improving, appearing more dark green than brown. We had never seen the lake level so low in our over 50 years on the lake. Old tree stumps appeared. One of the most interesting things to emerge in front of our home was the remains of an old boat. The lettering on the side said Pooh Bear. It was identified as a 1920s-era water taxi that sank in the 1950s,
My brother Mike has a home located on the main channel. He shared with me this observation: When the lake hit its lowest levels, between the rapidly expanding shoreline and remaining channels of water, several large shallow pools were created. It looked like North Carolina’s coastal tidal pools at low tide. It wasn’t long before the local birds of prey discovered the trapped fish. We saw Bald Eagles, Belted Kingfishers, and Double-crested Cormorants enjoying the sushi. One enterprising eagle perched next to our porch – I think he was looking for wasabi.
The US Army Corps of Engineers under the direction of FEMA worked tirelessly to help us get our beloved lake back. We remember watching them at work from the windows of the Rumbling Bald Resort while attending a town hall meeting in the late summer of 2025. Huge heavy equipment, including excavators, rock trucks, and bulldozers, were at work removing massive amounts of sediment and debris. The same equipment was being used on the other end of the lake as well. Over a million tons of sediments were removed and loaded onto an endless line of dump trucks. If you sat on the outside porch at La Strada restaurant, you could watch truck after truck go by (and smell the diesel fumes).
When it was time for the lake level to start coming up again, we worried about
the amount of debris, especially logs, that remained stranded on the shore and would surely start floating again when the water came up. Sure enough, as the water rose, here came the parade of “stuff” again. Crews from the North Carolina State Mission Assigned Recovery Task (SMART) Program started working, removing remaining debris floating in the lake and on the shoreline. To date, they have cleared more than 1,400 cubic yards of debris, and their efforts are ongoing.
In March, we were able to watch an amazing sight! 18 months after the lake shut down, several collegiate rowing teams were allowed to use the lake for practice during their spring break as in years past. Their long sculls and accompanying boats containing coaches populated the lake especially in the early morning hours.
The water is now back up to normal levels and the color is the normal green. This morning we looked out to see a long goose swimming along. Look out guy! The lake is reopening to boats at the end of May and soon you will have lots of company!
