That is just shocking to me. An area like that should have a weather recording station at least every few miles.

79 currently with a low of 37, a little bit of haze/smoke but not bad, just a beautiful early fall day. It's too bad a lot of trails are closed due to "fires" that are 100% contained and nowhere near some of the closed trails, with no crazy fire spreading conditions coming up. The person in charge of the closures in Deschutes national forest is doing a pretty d*mn lousy job, it's pretty annoying.

Several reasons. Lack of stations in the general landfall area being a big one, that Big Bend area is very remote. Power failures and equipment malfunctions with anemometers at those speeds is another one. You also will rarely see the strongest winds from a hurricane fully mix down to the surface outside of those places on the strong side of the eyewall (generally NE quadrant) along the immediate coast, so a very narrow area of the storm. Once a storm comes ashore, friction with land will almost always pretty immediately reduce the peak observed windspeeds, so even a few miles makes a difference in terms of where those peak winds actualize. I don't doubt that 100+mph winds occurred, though. The town of Alma, GA actually had the highest officially measured gust with this at 100mph even and they're over 100 miles inland from the landfall location. Very impressive to see such strong winds that far inland.

That doesn't answer the actual question though.

There was a gust to 100 in Georgia, well inland of where Helene made landfall. But the likely answer to your question is that there are few stations in the landfall area, and basically none on the coast itself. The Big Bend is basically a huge swamp that hardly anyone lives in. The spot that Helene made landfall at is a wildlife management area that is the most sparsely populated of the region. The first town east of there (“town” is a generous word here) is about 25 miles down the coast. But there are no weather stations there. In fact it doesn’t look like there any at all until you reach Cedar Key—75 miles southeast of that wildlife preserve.