Burke County tourism pushes back after Helene’s aftermath

As a gateway to the Blue Ridge Mountains, Burke County is full of mountainous hiking trails and breathtaking scenery in its two state parks and along the Blue Ridge Parkway, attributes that Burke County Tourism leans into when marketing the area to travelers.

A year after Hurricane Helene ravaged the region with destructive winds and raging flood waters, most of those natural attractions are once again open for enjoyment.

But a question raised at last week’s Burke County Tourism Summit, held at the Morganton Community House, was, “Do prospective tourists know those attractions are open?”

“We track visitor sentiment every month, and we ask people who don’t want to come to western North Carolina, ‘Why don’t you?’” Visit North Carolina Executive Director Wit Tuttell said at the summit.

“One of the responses was … ‘I feel the area is not ready to host me after the hurricane.’”

Tuttell said in November 2024, 28% of respondents felt that way. As of August of 2025, that number dropped to 8%.

“We’re going to knock that number down until it’s zero,” Tuttell said.

Helene was discussed throughout the summit, with a focus on recovery efforts. Burke County Tourism CEO Ed Phillips also gave out plaques to organizations that assisted with storm recovery.

Speaking broadly of Western North Carolina, Tuttell said Helene was the first crisis he’s seen where social media played a bigger role in transmitting information than traditional media.

“It’s a lot easier for us as marketers to manage the message with traditional media, because that’s 10 knuckleheads with cameras that are out standing on a mountain … but now with social media, it’s 1,000 people with their phones, and they could be anywhere, and they’re shooting footage,” Tuttell said.

Survey respondents who felt Western North Carolina was unprepared to welcome them steadily decreased over the six months following Helene, and then those numbers shot up again, Tuttell said.

Tuttell said what happened was people scrolling down social media saw old photos of flooding reposted and did not realize they were old photos. At the time, call centers received numerous calls asking whether Asheville had flooded again.

“So as we hit the one year — we’re not calling it an anniversary, we’re calling it a milestone of the hurricane — if you see something on social media where somebody’s posted something that’s old, just make sure to go ahead and put a post in there that, ‘Yeah, that did happen, but we are back, and you can kayak, and you can whitewater raft, and you can come and experience these great things,” Tuttell said.

The visitors center, picnic areas, and most hiking trails are open at South Mountains State Park, although the park is not yet allowing equestrians or bicycle riders.

Most of the hiking trails and biking trails are open at Lake James State Park, as is its visitors center.

Smaller parks, including Valdese Lakeside Park and Oak Hill Community Park and Forest, are fully reopened.

The continuing recovery of areas along the Blue Ridge Parkway as it passes through Burke County, specifically the Linville Falls visitors center and picnic area, means the popular fall color trolley tours will not happen this year.

“The places where we typically took people, they’re just not ready for that, yet,” Phillips said. “Not for tours. Individuals? Yes.”

Traditionally, visitors took tours in a trolley, starting in Morganton and going up N.C. 181. Phillips said the next stop was the Linville Falls picnic area, which was washed away by Helene. The Linville Falls visitors center was also heavily damaged.

“With that Linville Falls area … damaged, and (with) less capacity for people (and) places to park, we decided it was in our best interest not to create more foot traffic up there during the fall, and we’ll just take it year by year and see what happens to the infrastructure up there,” Phillips said.

Phillips said the storm’s full impact on tourism in Burke County is not yet clear.

One unexpected benefit was hotels and restaurants raking in more revenue in the months following Helene, Phillips said, because Burke County hosted numerous disaster recovery crews.

“We think it has impacted us by travelers coming through here, but we’re not sure at what level,” Phillips said. “And we probably won’t know that for a couple of years, until … we see it start to trend back up. We don’t know where the bottom is until it starts to climb out.”