With nearly 200 hours of work, Valdese Lakeside Park reopened just over a week after Helene

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is just one of several stories in this week's edition that focuses on the progress of recovery efforts from Hurricane  Helene. See Saturday's print edition for more informative accounts of our road to recovery.

As Friends of the Valdese Rec assessed Hurricane Helene’s impact on Valdese Lakeside Park, they breathed a collective sigh of relief: it was a mess, but the fishing pier and suspension bridge hadn’t washed away.

“All our trail tread was fine. Our crushed cinder on the Greenway was fine,” said the group’s founder and president, Beth Heile. “We just had the issues of downed trees, and we just thought, ‘Oh my gosh, it's going to take us forever to get through it.’”

Eight days, 85 trees, and about 178 volunteer hours later, the park was reopened.

“We just went non-stop,” Heile said. “Probably like six hours a day, just working through it.”

Heile said she founded Friends of the Valdese Rec 10 years ago. The mission was to help the Parks and Recreation Department with fundraising, programming, volunteering, or anything else it needed. Another part of the mission was acquiring the property for Valdese Lakeside Park, and turning it into a park.

When post-Helene cleanup started, Heile said the first goal was to clear the 300-acre park’s 13 miles of trail.

The first chunk of trail cleared was the two-mile Greenway connecting Valdese Lakeside Park to McGalliard Falls Park. Heile said that was accomplished in two days.

“We used our own chainsaws, our own equipment and gas,” Heile said. “We weren’t worried if FEMA was going to reimburse us, or really doing any kind of inventory. We just wanted to get it done and get it opened.”

Heile said about 21 volunteers helped with the project. Some days there were six volunteers, other days there were up to 12, she said – and for all of them, she is grateful.

Some people on social media were a bit less than kind.

“Some people were like, ‘Why are you out there clearing that park, when you should be helping people that don’t have a house, or don’t have this or that?’” Heile said, adding: “When disaster strikes, there’s something for everyone. A lot of things need to be cleaned up and fixed, whether it’s someone’s house or a public park.”

Helene did not profoundly change or reshape the park, Heile said, though she finds it more cluttered than it once was.

“It looks like a bunch of pickup sticks out there sometimes, in some places” Heile said. “If you had six trees fall all at once, and we cut them up, and they're out of the trail, but at the same time, they're just all laying on each other.”

Even that, though, creates new habitats for animals, Heile said.

“It's just all part of nature. And, you know, the big root all sticking up … that is a little place rabbits can hang out, or raccoons or whatever,” Heile said. “We have so much wildlife out there, so I guess we’ll just say that that’s nature.”