On the shore of the North Toe River, Emily Gillikin picks through piles of debris left by Hurricane Helene.
Though it’s been more than 20 months since floods tore through Western North Carolina, Gillikin and roughly 90 other members of MountainTrue’s debris removal program are still harvesting thousands of pounds of debris from the region’s battered riverbanks and streams on a daily basis.
Mainly, what the crews find is junk: old tires, empty bleach containers and plastic pipes. But every so often, they find something more personal, like a stuffed animal, a coffee mug or a ballcap. On this outing, Gillikin spotted something interesting: a handmade wooden sign emblazoned with “The Hedricks” and a simple carving of a napping cat.
“That is something I found in the knotweed over there,” Gillikin said. “That'll go back to the mothership.”
The “mothership” is the nickname for MountainTrue's debris headquarters in Weaverville, where it stores canoes, kayaks, jet boats and other equipment. There, the Hedricks family sign eventually lands on Mandy Wallace’s desk, in a small office where her lost-and-found project has taken hold.
Before Helene, Wallace was a raft guide on the French Broad River. Now, after the storm disrupted the rafting industry, she’s become an artifact recovery technician, tracking down the former owners of mysterious objects lost down the river.
“I totally feel like Nancy Drew,” Wallace said, as she sifted through shelves crammed with photo albums, baseball cards, DVDs and a hodgepodge of other trinkets. “It’s really cool but also kind of scary that you can find out most anything. One thing will connect to something else and something will connect to something else and then that’s how I find people.”
So far, MountainTrue has collected more than 400 personal items – from a Reba McEntire coffee mug to a bedazzled children’s shoe to a multi-page love letter. Wallace has reunited more than 100 objects — including the Reba mug — with their owners.
‘“I try to approach it from 'What would I have hoped, you know, if my home had been washed down a river and I’d lost everything?’” Wallace said. “And this is what I hope someone would do."
It’s a weird job, Wallace acknowledges, and a far cry from guiding rafts downriver. But for her, it’s a way to help storm survivors reclaim a small piece of what the flood carried away.
‘“I try to approach it from 'What would I have hoped, you know, if my home had been washed down a river and I’d lost everything?’” she said. “And this is what I hope someone would do. I would hope that they would return things that were special to me, things that were special to my family. You know, even if it’s only one item.”
“I can tell you where everything came from”
Before there was a “mothership,” Wallace's process was more informal.
Back in March 2025, when MountainTrue had just started its debris cleanup program, Wallace was one of 10 crew members scouring rivers for trash. Whenever she found a special item, she’d bring it home, photograph it on her picnic table and search for its owner in her downtime.
Her first successful reunion was a baby album, belonging to mother Caitlyn Wright. Wallace remembers cleaning the album, posting a photo online and waiting.
“I put it on that Facebook group, and it was claimed within just four hours,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Okay, so this is kind of a thing.’”
This early success pushed her to track down others. As crews collected more personal items, Wallace said she decided to emulate efforts of volunteers in other places who have reunited flood victims with their possessions, like Raleigh resident Jill Holtz, and the “Found on the Guadalupe” web page in Texas’ Hill Country.
Wallace also has unique skills that set her work apart: she studied archaeology at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and was formerly employed as a lab technician for a private archaeology company, where she would clean, photograph and document items discovered at dig sites.
When MountainTrue received a $10 million grant in June from the NC Department of Environmental Quality, Wallace was able to transform her side hobby into a full-blown vocation.
Not long after receiving the grant, the nonprofit moved its debris operations to a warehouse in Weaverville.
In Wallace’s office, there’s a small photo booth area, archaeological tools and found objects stacked on shelves, tucked into drawers and spread across nearly every surface. Wallace catalogues each item, including the latitude and longitude of where it was recovered.
Eventually, she plans to publish an interactive map that would allow people to click through riverbanks, creeks and other access points to see what was recovered nearby.
“Someone could come in here and I could have a blindfold on and they could pull an item out from somewhere and hand it to me and I could tell you exactly when it came in, where it was from, you know, and some history hopefully behind it,” she said.
Once items are processed, she posts them on MountainTrue’s “Found After the Flood” Facebook page. Then comes the detective work.
More than “just stuff”
While the baby photo album was claimed within hours, other items require more prolonged sleuthing. A silk kimono stored in Wallace’s office or a plastic bag full of water-damaged memory cards can be difficult to trace to a specific person. And those are just a few of the hundreds of open cases Wallace is still trying to solve.
The Hedricks family sign has proved to be trickier than expected.
After posting a picture of the sign on numerous Facebook pages, Wallace called a general store near where the sign was found. She checked voter registration records and spoke with multiple people with the last name “Hedrick" who said the sign was not theirs. But she hasn’t given up yet.
“We tell ourselves that it's just stuff,” Wallace said. “And I think we're kind of good with that until somebody actually places some of your stuff back in your hands and then that's when it gets real again."
“There is a Hedrick that is a registered voter of an address in that area, but I can’t find a phone number or anything, so I might just drive up there and go knock on a door,” she said.
For Wallace, the work is both fulfilling and emotionally intense. People reunited with their items don’t always know what to do with them. The objects are often still coated in mud, some no longer functional. And seeing an old, water-damaged belonging can feel bittersweet or even a little awkward.
“We tell ourselves that it's just stuff,” Wallace said. “And I think we're kind of good with that until somebody actually places some of your stuff back in your hands and then that's when it gets real again,” she said. “But then it turns into stories. And it turns into, ‘I remember when so-and-so gave me this,’ And most times it turns happy. It does. And so, that makes it worth it, definitely,”
In early June, Wallace reunited one of the first objects she ever pulled out of the river: a vinyl record produced by Moon Caravan Records. It took Wallace months of detective work to find its owner, JoLeigh Bowden. Then, it took even more back and forth to set up the reunion.
Finally, on a sunny afternoon in Marshall, Bowden and Wallace both pulled up near the former site of Moon Caravan Records, the small indie label that Bowden ran with her husband. In the empty lot, just a stone’s throw away from the now-calm French Broad River, Wallace presented a mud-stained album by the musician Deerfrance, one of the last records Moon Caravan produced before Helene tore through town.
Only moments after saying hello, Wallace and Bowden hugged, as all of the emotions from Helene sunk in. No one said much at first — but it wasn’t long before Bowden began to gush about the record and the history of Moon Caravan Records, a “mom and pop” shop she described as a labor of love.
Bowden said she and her husband had released multiple records by Deerfrance, a New York City-based musician. “Her voice – she’d kill me if I said it – but it sounds like Stevie Nicks, but it’s over a harder background,” Bowden said.
“I'm so thrilled to get it,” Bowden said. “There's layers of meaning behind this and I'm going to figure it out, you know, in time.”
When Helene ripped through the building, Bowden lost nearly everything, including the hundreds of copies of Deerfrance albums she had just produced. At the time, Bowden considered putting out a bulletin for all the missing merchandise, but ultimately decided it felt too painful to list everything she had lost.
“I'm so thrilled to get it,” Bowden said. “There's layers of meaning behind this and I'm going to figure it out, you know, in time.”
While Bowden is still interpreting the return of the album, she said she’s taking it as a sign to produce more music – and as a reminder that for all Helene has taken away, it has also given something back.
“We've lost a lot. Emotionally, monetarily and all that – but we've also gained a lot,” Bowden said. “What we've gained from this whole experience is priceless. The value of the people we didn't realize, who came out of the woodwork.”
