BOSTON – A group of 11 friends were relieved to return home late Sunday night after a planned bachelor party turned into a harrowing, life-threatening experience.
Bride Kayla Donnelly of Walpole and her bridesmaids and friends planned her bachelorette party at a remote mountain cabin in Asheville, North Carolina over the summer – scheduled for the weekend of September 28. “We’re really not wilderness girls,” Donnelly told WBZ. . “We planned to stay in this beautiful cabin and then go downtown and do things there.”
The girls were unaware of it devastating Hurricane Helene would damage their side until it was too late. After the entire crew arrived at the cabin and hosted a pajama party on Thursday evening, they woke up to a devastating scene on Friday.
No power, water, cell service
There was no power. A tree had fallen on the roof, causing pieces of the ceiling to fall onto the floor and rain to come through. The deck was destroyed. “I have a pit in my stomach when I think about it because like you got to the top of the driveway and you just looked right and left and it was like… chaos,” explained bridesmaid Gina Costa of Bridgewater. “Like it was that bad. I thought, ‘We’re never going to get out of here,'” she said through tears.
Hours later it got even worse. The girls all lost their mobile connections and were unable to call or text family and friends back home. “That was the worst part, knowing that I’m such a communicative person, and I’m always reaching out to family, friends and my fiancée. So when they stopped hearing from me, I knew they would know something was wrong ,” Donnelly said.
Family back home knew something was wrong – and started a group chat at home for any updates and help they could get.
Meanwhile, the girls were stuck. Not only did they lack cell service and power, but they also ran out of food when their refrigerator stopped working. They had no running water. The road down the mountain, which was designed for cars, was warped and covered with trees. “I don’t even know how to explain it, like you couldn’t see the tar,” Costa said.
The girls walked around the rubble for 20 minutes in daylight to find nearby homes – and thanked the kind neighbors who live there full-time for offering water from their hoses and emotional support.
Stranger appears ‘out of nowhere’
After almost two days, patience started to wane. “It got to the point where every girl isolated herself and cried by herself because it was crazy,” Costa said. That’s when she heard one of her friends praying out loud — and moments later said, “Literally out of nowhere, the man on the top of the mountain at 6 p.m. said, ‘Hello! Is anyone there?'” she said. Her friend “started turning away screaming… She ran barefoot to the top of the hill” to get his attention.
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The kind stranger had climbed the mountain to help those in need. He helped the girls come up with a plan and promised to rescue them on Sunday if they could hike to the bottom of the mountain.
The girls left most of their luggage behind, locked in a friend’s car in the garage, and remained on the mountain indefinitely.
Three hour hike down the mountain
They put on the most comfortable clothes they had packed for what was supposed to be a weekend of celebration and began a three-hour hike up Elk Mountain, past trees, downed wires and buckled roads.
Several girls developed poison ivy, blisters and bruises, and one was hospitalized at home with an infected bee sting.
When the girls reached the bottom, they were rescued by kind strangers with a truck, taken to the local Lowe’s where a local school principal bought them a hot meal in a safety shelter, and later rescued again by a man named Doug, the same driver from the car service that dropped them off and drove three hours to find them and take them to the Charlotte airport to get home.
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“The people were great,” Costa said. “They offered to let you shower at their house, rides, etc.”
“I have never met nicer people than the people on that mountain, and in the Asheville area in general,” Donnelly added.
‘Many people need help’
The girls were a little traumatized on Monday but wanted to share their harrowing experience in the hope of getting help for the residents still trapped on the mountain in the Pindari Ridge area. With the devastating flooding on the news, “nobody really sees what’s going on there and there are a lot of people who need help,” Donnelly said. “A lot of people who haven’t been able to contact their families, a lot of people who haven’t been able to get down the mountain… That was a very, very hard journey down.”
The girls have saved names, addresses and numbers and try to stay in touch with the kind people who helped them. They tell WBZ they plan to donate to a relief fund to pay back the city that saved them from disaster.
“When I literally say, I can’t believe I’m standing here today… That’s a feeling in my gut… that I thought I wasn’t going to make it,” Costa said.
Kristina Rex
