Yonah Mountain

The Ranger hill

Yonah Mountain is a test. The Army’s 5th Ranger Training Battalion runs the course’s mountain phase out of north Georgia, and by the Army’s own description the march up Yonah, which students must make in about 45 minutes, is often considered the hardest event of that phase. The mountain earns it. It stands by itself between Cleveland and Helen, and its upper slopes break into open rock. The Southeastern Climbers Coalition calls it a granite dome and names the Main Face, the White Wall and the Middle Wall. By the coalition’s history the Army has taught basic mountaineering on those faces since about 1960, and civilian climbers followed in the 1970s onto rock the soldiers weren’t using. In 1997 the Trust for Public Land, with the coalition and the Access Fund, bought 45 acres at the base after the private land around the mountain was closed, and passed it to the Forest Service.

What it’s made of

That depends on who you ask. The New Georgia Encyclopedia, describing the Blue Ridge, says granite magma formed when deep rocks partly melted and pushed up into the metamorphic rocks above, and that Mount Yonah is made of that granite, about 375 million years old. A Georgia Botanical Society field trip notice calls Yonah a Piedmont monadnock, an isolated hill left standing as the land around it wore down, and lists its rocks as biotite gneiss, mica schist and amphibolite. Both may be partly true of different parts of the mountain, but nothing read here settles it. The same notice says the mountain has a rich flora with plants far from their western ranges and Appalachian endemics at their southern limit, without naming them.

Name and story

The usual reading of Yonah is the Cherokee word for bear, though the one printed source for it is a 1990 newspaper piece. The mountain also carries the region’s lover’s-leap story of Sautee and Nacoochee, which George Williams spread in an 1871 travel book. The valley at its foot is old gold country. Gold turned up on Dukes Creek in 1828, and the county had nine mines working over the next century.

Going

The Forest Service trailhead is on the west side, and the trail runs about 2.1 miles to the top, steep in places, with views north into the mountains. The Forest Service pitches it as an hour or two outdoors. There are no restrooms. The Forest Service says slips and falls at the top are the main hazard, so stay back from the edges of the open rock.