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Behind the two-story wooden office building and gift shop of the Hot Springs Resort & Spa is a moonscape. Mounds of sand at least 10 feet high and craters 15 feet deep scar a landscape once lush with trees and flowering bushes. 

Flooding from Hurricane Helene washed 13 of the resort’s 17 cabanas and their jetted hot tubs into the French Broad River. The spring and pump system that carried natural mineral water across Spring Creek and into the hot tubs is gone, too, along with the resort’s campground, six overnight guest suites, and six cabins.

In a town of slightly more than 5oo, the 103-acre resort drew an average of 70,000 visitors annually, including hundreds of Appalachian Trail hikers. As the first town that thru-hikers hit heading northbound from Georgia, Hot Springs has long been a place a place to rest, shower, eat, and resupply. As Allison Salerno reports, businesses are now struggling to reopen with a new tourism season not far on the horizon.

Tourism-Dependent Hot Springs Tries to Rebuild by Spring

As the first town on the Appalachian Trail for thru-hikers heading north, Hot Springs has been a destination for people to rest their weary legs. But damage from Hurricane Helene has put the upcoming season in question. 

Diploma-tic Relations

Unsurprisingly, members of the General Assembly are much more likely to have gone to college than the population as a whole: 79 percent of North Carolina’s lawmakers have a bachelor’s degree, compared to 37 percent of the state’s overall 25+ population.

But behind that 79 percent lies a wealth of partisan differences.

About a third of Democrats went to law school, while the same proportion of Republicans have less than a bachelor’s. A quarter of Democrats went to an HBCU. Only one Republican did, but more than 80 percent of North Carolina community college alumni in the legislature are Republicans.

Find out all that and more in our analysis of the General Assembly’s alma maters.

Have a news tip for our team? You can reach us at scoops@theassemblync.com.

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What We’re Reading

Snowsuit up: WRAL checked a few local stores to see if sleds were available ahead of a possibly snowy weekend and found several were all out. (Store managers declined to go on camera.)   

Back to Work: New House Speaker Destin Hall said he’d like to see a “mini” budget bill passed soon with more storm relief, per The N&O. Senate GOP leader Phil Berger named education, infrastructure, child care, health care, and disaster response as priorities.

Hack the System: A hacker attacked the PowerSchool information system that N.C. public schools use to track data on student enrollment, grades, health and attendance, WUNC reports.

‘Pizzagate’ Update: A man who died this week after being shot by two Kannapolis police officers was the same man arrested in Washington, D.C., in 2016 for shooting an AR-15 inside Comet Ping Pong, via the Charlotte Observer.

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