The Georgia Blue Ridge

The Blue Ridge crosses into Georgia and runs about a hundred miles before it ends, the crest standing at 3,500 to 4,700 feet above valleys cut 1,500 feet and more below it, until the land drops off at the Brevard Fault near 1,700 feet onto the Piedmont. This entry takes the crest from Springer Mountain northeast past Blood Mountain to Brasstown Bald, Tray Mountain, and Rabun Bald, with the Chattooga and Tallulah country on its eastern side. The grouping is Doghobble’s; what the state’s 1976 physiographic map calls the Blue Ridge Mountains District is the nearest established unit, and it too leaves the Cohuttas to their own entry.

Brasstown Bald, at 4,784 feet, is the highest ground in Georgia, and its summit is a shrub bald. Georgia has no spruce-fir; the ice age left these mountains too low for it, and what the highest summits carry instead is northern hardwood forest and the boulderfields that frost heaved out of the north-facing coves some twenty thousand years ago. On Brasstown’s north face stand old yellow birches draped in lichen, with bluebead lily and twisted stalk that one botanist reports at the southern edge of their range, a stand Charles Wharton called Georgia’s only cloud forest. By Wharton’s reckoning the north slope of Tray Mountain carries the best boulderfield in the state, and Sosebee Cove below Blood Mountain the most reachable one, with yellowwood growing in it.

The crest is the Eastern Continental Divide, and at Young Lick, where Habersham, Rabun, and Towns counties meet on the Appalachian Trail, the water, as the maps read, parts three ways: to the Savannah and the Atlantic, to the Chattahoochee and the Gulf, and to the Hiwassee, the Tennessee, and the Gulf by way of the Mississippi. The Chattooga, running fifty-seven miles from Whiteside Mountain to Lake Tugalo, became a Wild and Scenic River in 1974, two years after Deliverance was filmed on it. The Tallulah was dammed in 1913 to run Atlanta’s streetcars, over the objection of a lawsuit that lost; the gorge below the dam is nearly a thousand feet deep and a tightrope walker crossed it in 1886, or 1883 by another account, and Karl Wallenda in 1970, before thirty thousand people and a governor.

The Cherokee, or the people before them, may have been here by the middle of the 1400s. At Track Rock Gap, by the Forest Service archaeologists’ dating, the soapstone boulders were quarried for bowls at least 3,600 years ago and carved over several centuries beginning about a thousand years ago, and a stone-walled complex on the slope above dates to the same era. In May and June of 1838 the Cherokee of these counties were gathered at Fort Hetzel in Ellijay, Fort Floyd at Dahlonega, and a camp near Blairsville, and marched out over the Unicoi Turnpike; the general in charge reported no Indians left in Georgia by June 15. Gold had been found at the southern foot of the range nine years before, and the federal mint at Dahlonega struck almost a million and a half coins before 1861.

The forest was sold in the 1880s and cut by rail and splash dam; a lumberman’s offer of 31,000 acres in 1911 was among the first tracts approved under the Weeks Act, and the Chattahoochee National Forest was proclaimed in 1936 with roughly a third of the ground it had bought still uncut. By the early 2000s less than two percent was. The Appalachian Trail began at Mount Oglethorpe until 1958, when chicken farms along the ridge and vandals on the summit road moved its southern end thirteen miles north to Springer. Helen, a dead sawmill town, was remade as a Bavarian village after a businessmen’s lunch in 1968, and draws more than a million visitors a year, which is one way to answer a question Doghobble is also trying to answer, and the wrong one.