To find the kinds of places where rare synchronous fireflies might light the night, you drive west from the North Carolina hamlet of Maggie Valley, turn onto Newfound Gap Road (US 441), and turn again onto one of the many low-lying pull-offs edging this scenic route across the Great Smoky Mountains.

You turn off your headlights, you sit in your car, and you wait a while.

“You need to be patient,” Becky Nichols, Great Smoky Mountains National Park entomologist, tells me. “Look deep into the forest. Let your eyes adjust to the dark, especially around moist, leafy areas.” Or, you can get out of your car and wander down to the stream. If you wait long enough, for a few weeks in late May or early June, specifically between the hours of 9:30 and 11:30 p.m., you just might see them.

They are well worth the wait. On an inky-dark night in late May 2024, my sister and I stood watching this ephemeral wonder: first, a few flickers deep in the woods, and then, thousands of fireflies pulsing their tiny yellow-white lanterns, synced perfectly. It was thrilling and mesmerizing witnessing Photinus carolinus, one of 19 known species of fireflies to live in the Smokies. But what makes these so special is that they are just one of a few species in the world to synchronize their flash patterns. Driving back to the cabin we were sharing about 40 miles from Asheville, my sister and I marveled that of the more than 2,000 species of fireflies, only three are synchronous. Not only had we been lucky enough to see one, we’d shared the experience together.

But four months later, on Friday, September 27, Hurricane Helene barreled through North Carolina, bringing historic rainfall and catastrophic flooding. By December, at least 238 deaths and $124 billion in damage had been attributed to the storm. Extreme winds devasted once-tranquil forests in the Blue Ridge Mountains north of Asheville, and washed-out roads stranded even the hardiest residents. The severe damage to these areas, the region’s worst natural disaster in over a century, is widely known.

The same cannot be said about the forests and valleys just an hour west, in the Great Smoky Mountains. I worried about the rare fireflies we’d witnessed and wondered whether flooding might have wiped out their populations forever. I also worried about the friendly folks my sister and I had met during our travels. Most of the restaurants, diners, museums, and shops in the small mountain towns of western North Carolina are authentic mom-and-pops, relying heavily on seasonal visitors.

“As far as fireflies are concerned, the larvae live underground for a year before they pupate as adults. Undoubtedly there is going to be some impact, especially in the eastern corner of the park, which got hit the worst,” Nichols says, a few months after the storm. “They tend to be in areas with a lot of nice, deep forest leaf litter. If they’re close to streams that flow through the valley, well, all of those streams came way out of their banks. The low-lying areas on the North Carolina side of the park were inundated. So yes, I would expect there will be some impact from the storm, but there will be enough reserves of other larvae. They’ll come back.”

And what about America’s most-visited national park itself, with its ridges upon ridges of forest and ancient mountains straddling Tennessee and North Carolina? While most of the park was far west enough of Helene’s path to escape much flooding, its eastern edges were swamped.

“I live in Asheville but work in the Smokies,” says Joe Yarkovich, a wildlife biologist for Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Although there was significant damage in western North Carolina, “everything in the park got hit way less hard than what you saw around Asheville. There were trees down, and there was some flooding, but if you want to plan a hiking or camping trip in the Smokies this spring, it’s totally doable. Folks don’t realize it, but about 90 percent of the park has reopened.”

Yarkovich, also known as “The Elk Guy,” monitors the Smokies’ fledgling elk population, which has grown to nearly 270 ungulates since 52 elk were successfully reintroduced in the park’s Cataloochee Valley in 2001. Even before the storm, few visitors ventured to the remote Cataloochee Valley side of the park, where my sister and I cautiously maneuvered our rental car up a winding gravel mountain road (without guardrails) to check out the rewilded elk.

It was also here, deep in the dark woods one starlit night, that we found the rare synchronous and even a few “blue ghost” fireflies, the only firefly species in North America that emits blue light … with the help of a wonderful local guide who made us pledge to never reveal the tiny insects’ exact location.

 I pledge this vow of secrecy,
 so they may live in synchronicity,
 forever here until eternity,

my college-professor sister and I solemnly swore, like 60-year-old Girl Scouts. Our guide needn’t have worried. The route was so convoluted in the dark, we couldn’t have retraced it if our lives depended on it. The next day we returned two hours before sunset to see the elk, which were honestly a bit anticlimactic, but still notable since their successful reintroduction in North Carolina. Elk once freely roamed the southern Appalachians before vanishing in the mid-1800s due to relentless hunting and destruction of habitat.

I was concerned about the elk, too, after hearing that Cataloochee Road would be closed indefinitely after Hurricane Helene. But it turns out elk are about as resilient as Appalachian mountain folk.

“As far as the elk population goes, all they had to do was walk uphill and wait for the water to go back down. Believe me, they’re fine,” Yarkovich assures me.

The best place to see these intrepid elk while Cataloochee is closed (the mountain road is undamaged but the road through the lower Cataloochee Valley washed out) is the Oconaluftee side of the park, about a half-hour drive east of Maggie Valley. Even though parts of western North Carolina were heavily impacted by the storm, this spring — specifically May and June — should be an ideal time to plan a trip.

“Stop in at the Oconaluftee Visitor Center,” says Yarkovich. “It’s a great place for wildlife viewing, and there will be a lot happening: the bears are active in spring, and June is elk-calving season. Once the calves get up and start running around testing their legs, it’s very fun to see them. And depending on what kind of hike you’re looking for, the folks there can point out the best trails.”

Western North Carolina’s trout-rich waters have long been a fly-fishing haven. But what about the mountains’ secluded streams and wild fish populations? Would they have been pummeled or, even worse, washed away by Helene’s flooding?

“We’re still covered in trout,” Powell Wheeler, fisheries biologist for North Carolina’s Resources Commission, reassures me. “We have three species here: rainbow, brown trout, and brook trout. Brook trout are the most special to us; they’re our native trout.”

As a fish biologist, Wheeler thinks in terms of fish populations and says that, this spring, the region’s rivers and streams will be fine for fishing. “Even with this level of catastrophic flooding, stream fish are extremely adaptable. It always amazes me that such a delicate-seeming animal can be so resilient.”

Annie Colquitt, co-owner of Cataloochee Ranch, a 685-acre Smoky Mountain landmark founded nearly a hundred years ago, agrees that spring and fall will not only be crucial for the area’s recovery but excellent times to visit, especially with crowds down. The ranch, which sits at 4,800 feet in a mountain meadow with sweeping vistas, had some trees topple, but no major damage.

“Our first concern was getting in touch with our employees — all were safe,” Colquitt says of the storm. “Next, we started looking at how we could help the region stay strong. We realized that, in the end, what makes Cataloochee so special is not just the place, but the people. Mountain people are the kind of people who show up with chainsaws to help.”

Colquitt and her husband, David, decided to be hugely generous, committing $2 million over the year to the community’s recovery and rebuilding effort. “We wanted to go big because it’s very needed here,” Colquitt says.

The ranch’s chicly restored 1930s cabins and new lodge rooms are open and guest-ready. If you’re staying elsewhere in the valley, you can also drive up to Cataloochee for lunch or dinner at Switchback, the ranch’s delightful restaurant, and then take a horseback ride or hike into the Smokies.

My sister and I did both, riding sure-footed horses Charlie and Dodger up to Smoky Mountain National Park. Our guide Maddie led us past cattle and their newborn calves on a trail through a leafy forest, and then across a high meadow where pink mountain laurel and wild rhododendron bloomed. It was beautiful, the pale blue sky and drifting white clouds, the heart-stirring vistas, the little cattle dog Sadie trotting alongside us. “Every day is different,” Maddie says, twisting in her saddle. “It’s never the same view here; the light is always changing.”

We were so inspired by our ride, we woke early the next morning and hiked back up the trail and into the park. The Cherokee described these mountains as shaconage, meaning “blue, like smoke.” Gazing out at the ridges from where we stood on the high trail, we marveled that they did look bluish in the morning mist shrouding the valleys below.

“It’s a different kind of beauty,” Colquitt tells me later, as we compare east and west. “There are more species of trees in the 800 square miles of Smoky Mountain National Park than in all northern Europe. There is such a richness here in the natural world.”

It’s true. Having grown up hiking California’s rugged Sierra Nevada, my sister and I were floored by the Smokies’ lush biodiversity. “It’s one of the most ­biodiverse ­places on Earth,” says entomologist Becky Nichols, describing an ongoing project to catalogue every single species living in Great Smoky Mountains National Park — at last count, 22,143 different kinds of mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, plants, protozoa, fungi, mollusks, and worms.

Just thinking about all that diversity gives me hope. Not to mention the hardy, resilient people who call western North Carolina home. This spring, summer, and fall, you can come visit them and be part of helping the region recover. “All the little shops in these valleys are so dependent on tourism,” says Colquitt. “The damage of travelers not coming back can also be catastrophic.”

For current conditions in the Great Smoky Mountains, check the National Park Service website, nps.gov/grsm, or call (865) 436-1200 for updates and alerts.

Kim Brown Seely’s writing has appeared in Travel + Leisure, National Geographic, Sunset, and others.

This article is featured in the May/June 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.