Forest Educator with Ricardo Sierra | A Podcast for Revolutionary Conversations about Nature-Based Education · Ricardo Sierra

Damage Report: The Impact of Hurricane Helene with Grant Adkisson

·1 hr 12 min·4 clips

Grant was on a tractor at 1 a.m. digging swales and screwing boards into roofs before the storm intensified.

Ricardo opens by thanking Grant for making time after Helene. Grant is in Marsville, North Carolina, north of Asheville and just over the ridge from Barnardsville, and the geography matters because the storm hit roads and water levels differently on each side. They were just starting their fall homeschool semester, with Nature Connection programs built around homesteading skills, craft, and the wider Nature Connection and outdoor-education work they had been doing for years. Then the roads started to fail. Grant describes trees down everywhere, washouts in some places, caved-in sections in others, and roads that were still there but buried under so much timber they were hard to recognize. Nobody stayed put. Neighbors came from all directions, including country guys, hippie neighbors, younger folks, and bear hunters, and the point is less who they were than the fact that they all ended up working together on the same side of the saw. There was an excavator, too. It happened to be on site for house work, so the people there used it, cut a gap through the trees, and worked from both sides until the road was down to a narrow track by afternoon. That is the kind of detail the conversation trusts. It stays with what actually got people out, which was timber cut by hand, borrowed machinery, and the willingness of neighbors to show up. Grant also explains why his section fared differently. The topography kept them from the worst of the water, even though the road still had damage, while places farther over the mountain lost bridges and whole stretches in a way that made recovery much harder. Ricardo keeps coming back to the children. Grant says the ability to show up for kids changes when adults are spending their days clearing roads and handling immediate practical needs. The conversation stays grounded in lived experience, with room for the mixed reality of disaster response, and that pacing gives the episode its weight. By the end, Ricardo offers donation and support links, and Grant leaves it with thanks and the sense that the work is still ongoing. The result is a story about recovery that never loses sight of the people who make recovery possible.

As heard by us

A storm story told through roads, neighbors, and the work of getting back out.

This episode gives a ground-level account of what Hurricane Helene did to a rural Nature Connection program. Fall homeschool sessions were just getting underway, roads were blocked by fallen trees, and neighbors had to work together to cut a way out.

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Why you'd press play

Hear how a nature-connection homeschool program kept going after Helene hit western North Carolina.

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