Brasstown Bald

Top of Georgia

Brasstown Bald is the highest ground in Georgia, 4,784 feet by the Forest Service, just south of the North Carolina line and about nine miles east of Blairsville. On a clear day the view from the observation deck takes in Georgia, Tennessee and both Carolinas. The summit gets weather the valleys don’t. The Sherpa guide describes the summit catching wind, rain and cold that miss the valleys, with snow and ice through much of the winter and cloud sitting on the north face often enough to keep that side wet year round.

The top is a shrub bald, as Charles Wharton classed it. Thin, cold soil keeps the shrubs few. By the Sherpa guide’s description you climb from the parking lot through rhododendron, then purple rhododendron, then into a stunted forest of red and white oak, old and twisted, before the bald itself, where it lists dwarf willow and red-berried mountain ash. The New Georgia Encyclopedia says the summit is made of Great Smoky Group rock, surrounded by rocks of a thrust sheet that once lay over it.

The north face

Georgia has no spruce-fir. Its highest summits carry northern hardwoods instead, often over boulderfields that, by Wharton’s account, frost pried loose in the north-facing coves some 20,000 years ago. In his 1978 survey of the state’s natural environments Wharton singled out the great birch forest on Brasstown’s north face. In an essay the Sherpa guide reprints, he described giant yellow birches hung with lichen along the Wagon Train Trail below the tower, called the stand Georgia’s only cloud forest, and warned that fire or logging could undo it.

Bruce Roberts, botanizing the same trail in 2021, found a boulderfield of large old birches with Canada mayflower and long-stalk holly, and two northern plants, bluebead lily and rosy twisted stalk, which he reports as rare in Georgia at the southern edge of their range. Two and a half miles west, the Forest Service’s Plott Cove Research Natural Area protects 312 acres on the north slope of Buzzard Roost Ridge, where yellowwood, butternut and silverbell are thick in the upper cove.

The mountain has at least one animal of its own. In 2025 Ernesto Recuero and Michael Caterino described Ligidium enotahensis, a woodlouse from mixed-forest leaf litter on Brasstown Bald, known so far from nowhere else. They named it for Enotah, the Cherokee name for the mountain.

The names

The English name is probably a mishearing. Settlers took the Cherokee Itse’yi, a green place, for Untsai’yi, brass, and the settlement became Brasstown. The 1958 state marker near Hiawassee reads the Cherokee name as describing a grassy top rather than a wooded one, and tells a Cherokee flood story in which a few families came to rest on the summit in a great canoe and the Great Spirit cleared its trees so they could plant until the water went down.

Going

The Forest Service runs a visitor center on top with a small natural-history museum. A steep paved trail of 0.6 mile climbs from the parking lot, and a shuttle runs for anyone who’d rather not. The Wagon Train Trail, an old road once meant to be a state highway, is the way into the birch forest. The Georgia Wilderness Act of October 27, 1986 put about 11,405 acres around the mountain into the Brasstown Wilderness, a 1991 act enlarged it, and published figures for its present size don’t agree.