Helene's Hellbenders
- Tal Galton
- Oct 5
- 7 min read
First of all … in their Helene-iversary edition last week, Asheville’s Mountain XPress published Healthy and Alive: Mountain Rivers Deserve Our Care and Protection, a piece I initially wrote much earlier in the summer. At 2000+ words, the original was far too long (their limit is 1200), so I whittled and carved, and eventually reduced it to a form suitable for publication. Our civilization continues to wrestle with the aftermath of Helene, and I feel the essay -- like this earlier blogpost about rivers -- is an important part of the conversation, so please share it with your friends and networks. Although the Mt XPress article is accompanied by a hellbender photo that I provided, I barely mention the charismatic salamanders in the article. What follows below is not an outtake (those may or may not ever see the light of day); it is a sequel with the same theme (the river is alive!), but with new, very exciting developments…
Long before dawn on that fateful day last September, I spent hours listening to rain pour from the sky. The sun did not rise, but light eventually illuminated the scene, and I watched the water consume or alter everything in its path. Later — after hours spent with neighbors, assisting and assessing, and eventually conducting a community meeting — that interminable day finally ended in a long, dazed walk home through our changed landscape. We planned to use the last remaining minutes of daylight to settle into our own new off-grid lifestyle.
The road had reappeared, the still-rushing river having dropped back to a few feet below the gouged and scoured roadbed, twenty feet below its crest just seven hours earlier. Muddy water pooled and trickled through this network of deep ruts, and the 11-year-old who lives next door shouted, “Hellbender!” Sure enough, bobbing limply near the surface of the brown water was one of our iconic river salamanders. A second one appeared, a bit larger and more active, slowly wriggled towards the trickling outlet of the gash in the road. Both were immature, 6”-10” animals, but distinctly hellbender-shaped. They looked every bit as dazed and confused by their changed world as we were. Our 6th grade neighbor gently scooped the bigger and livelier one up and released it close to an eddy of the river. It paused briefly before diving into the dark current.
For weeks after the flood, we heard reports of stranded hellbenders — ones rescued from flooded basements, some found dead or dying in drying mud. There was much hand-wringing over the state of the river and its inhabitants. A little over a week after the storm, Jess was enjoying a moment of sunshine on our local river rocks, and watched as a large one emerged from the water and slowly climbed the dry and sunny rock, portaging the rapids. In her video, it looks like a mythical sea creature, hauling itself over land — presumably homing upriver on a grueling journey to its nest rock.
I’ve lived by this river for over a quarter century, and have averaged less than one hellbender sighting per year. Fast forward to spring 2025, and I started seeing hellbenders like I’ve never seen them in the past. By August, I’d already seen several. This year’s success is likely due to the extra attention I’ve paid to the river since the storm, and the honing of my ability to see things in the water. Then, in early September, I volunteered for NCWRC’s annual hellbender census of the Nolichucky watershed led by Clifton Avery. In his day job Clifton’s an ornithologist, tracking peregrine falcon nest sites and other rare birds, but during hellbender nesting season he helps lead the giant salamander count. I spent two days shivering in a wetsuit, crawling through the South Toe, hunting for hellbenders. Clifton must be part seal -- he did this for two straight weeks (to be fair, he often wears two wetsuits).
Long ago hellbenders evolved from stone — or so they appear. These amphibians have actually been in North American rivers for so long that river rocks are among the few characters currently on scene who recall a time before giant salamanders crawled the river bottoms. It’s thought that each adult hellbender occupies a favorite rock shelter on the bottom of the river. When you locate a hellbender’s head in the doorway of its stone lair, it is the perfect shape of river rock — a good-sized skipping stone, albeit a hair too fat. Their mouth is a grin-shaped crack in the smooth and mottled stone; their tiny, beady eyes and even smaller nostrils are all that give them away, revealing them to be genetically distinct from stone.
When you find one out and about, they are usually nestled in a seam in the bedrock or smoothly wedged between the round stones of the river’s floor. Occasionally I’ve found one plodding through algal-covered river moss, like a slow motion dinosaur, their side-wrinkles flowing in rhythm with the moss. When they drift off the river bottom to navigate a riffle, they engage their powerful tail and suddenly become as graceful as otters. They are confidently camouflaged and unafraid, lightly dusted with silt and algae against a backdrop of similarly filmy stone.
Denmasters are the large males who establish domain over a nest cavity. They guard the entrance to their aquatic grotto, allowing only female hellbenders to enter. Once inside, a female will lay a couple hundred dime-sized eggs in a string of mucus, before scurrying away to avoid the ensuing testosterone-fueled fracas. The denmaster intently fertilizes the salamander spawn and begins a months-long guardianship of the nest. Orbiting the nest, drawn by the female’s hormonal secretions, are several satellite males. When they approach the nest, the denmaster ushers them away with a bite on the head, legs or tail, leaving the satellite males with bloody notches and flapping wounds. Salamanders have near-magical healing abilities, and the raw wounds quickly scar over. Most adult male hellbenders display bite marks on the top of their flat heads, and some are missing toes or pieces of tail.
If hellbenders did indeed evolve from stone, that particular fork in the tree of life occurred a very long time ago. Genetic and fossil evidence of hellbender ancestors in North America dates back 70 million years. They are as ancient as they appear — one of those creatures often dismissed as primitive. Ancient they may be, but sophisticated is a more apt characterization. Their skills in camouflage, hunting and moving fluidly through water are highly advanced. Their ability to thrive in these cold Appalachian rivers has been honed for millions of years. If it takes 10,000 hours for a person to master a skill, just imagine the expertise a species may accumulate by spending millions of years in the same waters eluding predators, hunting prey, and choreographing complex mating rituals.
We don’t really know how long individual hellbenders live. Many large reptiles have astonishing lifespans; tortoises can live centuries, timber rattlesnakes several decades. We know much less about the smaller amphibians, but a captive hellbender in Ohio that was born before 1980 died earlier this summer! There are almost certainly hellbenders in this river that lived through the 2004 floods; it seems possible that some who endured Helene also experienced the flood of 1977.
It took Clifton less than 10 minutes to find the first hellbender of the first day of the survey. Its stone head was just barely visible in the beam of his bright divelight, perfectly wedged under a rock that two of us had already scanned under with our inferior lights and unpracticed eyes. Within an hour, we’d found six more, most of them satellite males roaming around, mid-rut, occasionally stalking and chasing each other. At the end of the day, we tallied 19 on a quarter mile stretch of river. A week and a half later I went back out with Clifton and crew on the final day of the survey. We found 11 more hellbenders in an area that had not previously been surveyed. The numbers from this season's census have not been finalized, but Clifton reports that the 2025 hellbender survey in our watershed seems to be on par with recent years.
In retrospect, it was foolish to think that these aquatic creatures would have trouble surviving a flood. They have inhabited these bouldered and bedrocked rivers for tens of millions of years, and their ancestors have no doubt endured hundreds of Helenes. Hellbenders don’t require an ark to survive a flood, just a clean river with big boulders and plenty of bedrock crevices to hunker down in.
Postscript:
Just because hellbenders have survived Helene doesn’t mean they are not under threat. The number one thing they need is for us to keep the mountain rivers clean and silt-free. Intact forest, especially on the banks of our rivers and tributaries, is essential for keeping silt out of the rivers. Silt runs off from roads and road-building, other grading and construction, intensive logging, agriculture, and grassy or otherwise deforested yards that go to the waters’ edge. If you have streambank property, please keep your streams buffered with woody plants – their roots hold soil much better than grass. Also, please do not disturb hellbender habitat by moving river rocks. This means: no cairn or rock-stack building, no stone dams, no tube chutes. Riverside stone cairns are the bane of hellbenders and the NCWRC biologists who oversee their protection – please don’t stack rocks.
Further watching:
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