Inside a North Carolina mountain town that Hurricane Helene nearly wiped off the map
The stone tower that gave this place its name was nearly a half billion years in the making — heated and thrust upward from deep in the Earth, then carved and eroded by wind and water. “It feels like I was deployed, like, overnight and woke up in ... a combat zone,” Iraq War veteran Chris Canada said as a massive twin-propped Chinook helicopter passed over his adopted hometown. Nearly 400 miles (644 kilometers) from where Hurricane Helene made landfall Sept. 26 along Florida’s Big Bend, the hamlet of about 140 souls on the banks of the Broad River has been all but wiped from the map.
