Rescuing the Hickory Nut Gorge Green Salamander
Explore how conservationists are racing to save the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander, a rare species found only in western North Carolina, from the brink of extinction.
Search and Rescue
To give a rare salamander species a fighting chance, scientists must first trek into a hurricane-damaged gorge. And then they have to find them.
Text by Ashley Stimpson | Illustrations by Claire Harrup | Issue 2, 2026
In the weeks after Hurricane Helene hammered North Carolina in September 2024, JJ Apodaca had a lot on his mind: There was no potable water in his suburban Asheville home, no cell service on his phone, and something needed to be done about the six pine trees that had crashed down like pick-up sticks across his backyard.
And then there were the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamanders.
As the executive director of the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy (ARC), Apodaca has a fondness for all things scaly and squishy, but the salamander is especially dear to him. Apodaca was among the team of scientists who discovered Aneides caryaensis in 2019. The black creature with green speckles is rare. It’s being considered for listing under the Endangered Species Act, and, as of 2022, only an estimated 200 to 500 existed in the wild—all located in the 14-mile-long Appalachian gorge it’s named after, a gorge right in the heart of North Carolina’s current disaster zone.
Still, Apodaca had good reason to believe the amphibians were safe. Unlike most salamanders, the Hickory Nut Gorge green is seldom on the forest floor. Instead, it spends winter in crevices along the gorge’s steep cliffs and summer in nearby treetops, feasting on insects and finding mates. But in November, when Apodaca was finally able to get close enough to fly a drone over The Nature Conservancy’s Bat Cave Preserve, a 275-acre property in the Hickory Nut Gorge and one of the salamander’s last strongholds, what he saw shocked him.
Helene—still pushing hurricane-strength rain and wind gusts when it hit North Carolina—had passed right through the salamander’s tiny habitat, triggering land- and rockslides that demolished the tree cover and sent barn-sized boulders crashing into the Broad River below. The landscape was unrecognizable.
“I knew the Hickory Nut Gorge was trashed,” Apodaca says. “But I didn’t expect that.”
He feared that when the salamanders emerged from the rocks the following spring, there would be few standing trees to offer food or shade to the cold-blooded animals. The entire population of rare amphibians could blink out for good.
It would hardly be the first. A 2023 paper in the journal Nature revealed that amphibians are the most imperiled class of vertebrates on the planet, fighting a multifront war against fungal disease, climate change and habitat loss. Four in 10 amphibian species are globally threatened, and as many as 222 have already gone extinct.
So Apodaca quickly devised a rescue plan. Come spring, he and a team of conservation partners would bushwhack into the gorge, nab as many salamanders as possible and transport them to the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro, where they would be kept safe for the time being.
But in mid-May, that plan looked very much in doubt. After some initial reconnaissance, Brian Parr, TNC’s assistant land steward who oversees Bat Cave Preserve, had concerns about allowing a crew into the storm-ravaged site.
“Not to be dramatic,” Parr wrote in an email to the team, but getting to the salamanders’ habitat would require “fording the everchanging Broad River, bouldering, traversing areas with numerous crisscrossed downed trees, bushwhacking through loads of poison ivy and stinging nettle, traversing landslides in potentially unstable conditions.” And then there was also the possibility of bears, venomous snakes and yellow jackets. To even consider venturing in, the team would need a safety plan.
In the following days, Parr recruited local cavers and wilderness EMTs Kim Lughart and Jen White to accompany the team. Knowing the species’ future existence might depend on getting out of the gorge, Parr gave the operation the green light.
Saving Salamanders
On a bright day in late May, eight months after Helene, I join a group of nine people—conservation professionals representing TNC, ARC, the North Carolina Zoo and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—as they buckle helmets, lace up heavy boots and fasten life jackets. We have met at a turnout along the still-closed highway that forms the southern boundary of the preserve. Apodaca, who wears a hint of a mohawk in his curly, salt-and-pepper hair, hands out flashlights. Nearby, Lughart hitches a rope to the frame of her Nissan Rogue and coils out a guideline as she crosses the river, which is still strewn with trash and debris from the hurricane. Once on the opposite shore, she beckons each one of us through hip-high water with an encouraging smile.
Thirty minutes later, we are all across. The crew sets up a group text to keep in touch and then splits into three search teams.
I stay with Apodaca, ARC Wildlife Technician Hope Killian and Sue Cameron, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wildlife biologist. Together, we trudge up the hillside that previously was covered with a lush bouquet of locust and, of course, hickory trees. Now it is a landslide scar the width of a football field shrouded in downed timber. Soil the consistency of brownie batter gives way under our feet.
Once we reach the type of rock outcroppings the salamanders call home, Apodaca presses his face and a flashlight to a crevice that runs through the rock.
“We’ve got a green!” he calls out almost immediately.
Slinging his backpack into the dirt, Apodaca pulls out what he jokingly calls his “salamander extraction device”: a foot-long plastic zip tie. Gently slipping the zip tie in and out and up and down the crevice’s narrow opening, he tries to coax the salamander toward the sunlight. Minutes go by. The salamander won’t budge.
Gazing out on the shattered landscape, it is hard to imagine the preserve as Parr had described it: a verdant forest crowned by shiny granite. “A cathedral,” he says, where ancient, massive boulders slid, shifted and splintered over hundreds of millions of years to form North America’s largest granite fissure cave, with a ceiling about 85 feet high. “It was literally rock solid.”
That’s what he thought, anyway. The devastation at Bat Cave is by far the worst of the dozen preserves Parr oversees in western North Carolina.
“I’m fairly pragmatic about natural disturbance, because it’s just part of the landscape,” says Parr. “Trees come down; new trees come in. That’s not a bad thing.” But the damage at Bat Cave—unlike the slow geologic shifts that created it—was so violent, so total, “it’s heartbreaking, it’s emotional, it’s hard to put into words.”
We watch with muted horror as a half-dozen pine trees, along with rocks and dust, cascade down the mountain before us.
The hurricane surely exacted a severe but yet-unknown toll on the 37 rare plants, 14 rare animals and five species of bats found in the Hickory Nut Gorge. No doubt it washed and blew invasive species into Bat Cave’s borders, too. Parr doesn’t yet know the state of the titular cav
And the gorge is likely not done changing. As Apodaca patiently continues trying to move the animal out of its crevice, he explains that the gorge is a natural funnel for rainfall, where landslides are frequent—and may become more frequent given the increasingly brutal storms brought on by climate change and the unsettled terrain.
Beyond reestablishing safer access across the river, Parr isn’t quite sure what’s next for Bat Cave Preserve. The land will require time, just as our salamander-trapping endeavor does.
After almost an hour of careful effort, Apodaca is finally successful. From out of the rock face emerges a wiggling black creature, the green splotches practically glowing on its back.
“She’s a lady,” he announces. Better yet, she is gravid, carrying 13 eggs on her belly. By sunset, this salamander will be exploring its new enclosure at the state zoo. Apodaca and his teammates hope to establish a captive population there that might one day be released back into the wild. But where that release might take place—and when—is still a question.
The denuded landscape around us “will never be ready for them again,” Apodaca says, handing the amphibian to Killian, who will record its size, snap a picture, swab for disease and stash it in an insulated cooler. “Ultimately, we don’t know how to release these things because no one has ever done it.”
But this salamander, and the other two we will trap that day, are a promising start. So is the text message that soon pings our phones from the team higher up the mountain.
“Just got our second female with eggs. She’s HUGE,” it says.
Our excitement is short-lived. A frightening crack heralds a landslide on the other side of the gorge. We watch with muted horror as a half-dozen pine trees, along with rocks and dust, cascade down the mountain before us. It is a loud and daunting reminder that Helene was a weather event and a geological event—and many threats remain for the creatures trying to survive in its wake (including us).
A few minutes later, our team begins the careful march down the mountain, dodging nettle, shooing gnats and holding fast to coolers of salamanders and hopes for better times ahead. This gorge will change and a new forest will sprout, but until then its rarest residents will have a safe place to stay.
About the Creators
Ashley Stimpson is a freelance writer based in Maryland. You can find her work in The Washington Post, National Geographic and TNC's own Cool Green Science. She is a 2025-2026 Alicia Patterson Fellow.
Claire Harrup is an illustrator and printmaker in the United Kingdom. She has created art for various publishing houses along with The Guardian and others.
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