I've worked in a number of Forest Service and National Park Service areas that used mules to pack in gear for backcountry folks - in fire lookouts, or to camps where work was going to take a while, like places where they were building bridges. That was many years ago but I'm glad to see the practice is still alive and well.

The stories are heartrending, of all of the washed out roads and communities. People swept away, along with pets and livestock. These are resilient communities, rural and largely independent when it comes to keeping things running and building on their property, but this probably washed away tools and materials. Many of the loggers who moved to rural west coast logging communities at the turn of the last century relocated from western North Carolina. There were lots of Tarheels in Washington and Oregon mountain communities, and they kept in touch, traveling back and forth from Washington to North Carolina, to see family. Bryson City, Sylva, and Cherokee are names I remember people mentioning when they talked about family in NC. I worked in Gatlinburg as a ranger one summer in the Great Smokys and picked up the phone book for some small towns on the other side of the park in NC - names like Bryson, Nations, Green, all names I knew from Washington. Anyway, I can imagine an operation getting underway right now in those Cascade mountain communities ready to go help build back the NC communities.

I heard a story about flooding on the French Broad River, but didn't hear where the reporter was situated. That one runs from North Carolina into Tennessee (on the west side of the Eastern continental divide) and I used to cross it on my drive from where I was living in Kentucky to work each week in the Great Smoky Mountains. Google Maps has a red icon with wavy white lines to indicate flood information and I see one east of Knoxville and one labeled "Northeastern Tennessee floods" considerably north of the park. Though Kentucky was listed in the target zone as the storm moved it seems to have been spared a lot of that flooding this time around. They got clobbered hard last year.

All of those steep-sided little valleys in Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina are part of the bucolic beautiful scenery when driving around in sunny weather, but in the heavy rain they channel the water so fast it's easy to see how the damage happened.