Chattooga River

Off the escarpment

The Chattooga rises at the base of Whiteside Mountain near Cashiers, North Carolina, on the high ground at the top of the Blue Ridge Escarpment. The Chattooga Conservancy puts the headwaters at about 3,360 feet and Wikipedia at 3,894. The river runs south off the plateau, and below the North Carolina line it becomes the boundary between Georgia and South Carolina for about forty miles. It ends in Lake Tugalo, at about 890 feet, where it meets the Tallulah. The water leaving the lake is the Tugaloo, on its way to the Savannah. The federal hydrography data give the Chattooga 57 miles, the New Georgia Encyclopedia about 50 and the Conservancy about sixty. It drains about 280 square miles of North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.

Near the corner of the three states two survey stones sit in the river. Andrew Ellicott cut “N-G” into one in 1811, and commissioners from the two Carolinas marked another in 1813. Neither stands on the 35th parallel they were meant to fix. Wikipedia puts the parallel about 230 feet south of Ellicott’s stone, and the South Carolina Encyclopedia puts it about ten. A Cherokee settlement, Chattooga Town, stood near the mouth of the West Fork from about the late 1600s to the middle of the 1700s, by the Georgia Encyclopedia’s account.

Wild and Scenic

Congress designated the river under Public Law 93-279 on May 10, 1974, from 0.8 mile below Cashiers Lake down to the Tugaloo Reservoir, along with 7.3 miles of the West Fork. The Fish and Wildlife Service counts 58.7 designated miles, most of them classed wild, and the Georgia Encyclopedia and American Rivers give about 57. Deliverance had been filmed on the river in 1972. By the Georgia Encyclopedia’s count, visitors rose from under a thousand to more than twenty thousand between 1971 and 1974. The Conservancy’s account has a few hundred floaters a year before the film and about fifty thousand within four years, with twenty-four deaths.

Gorge and spray

D. M. DuMond collected 502 species and varieties of plants in the gorge in 1968 and sorted its vegetation into seven broad types, of which scarlet oak, chestnut oak and hickory forest was the most common. A rare mixed mesophytic forest held on in a few north-facing coves. On the wet rock beside the falls, Charles Zartman and Dan Pittillo later recognized nine distinct spray-cliff associations in the Chattooga basin, arranged by sun exposure and local flooding, with mosses and liverworts making up much of the cover and a high share of rare and disjunct plants. They likened the cliffs to islands. The Conservancy names Stekoa Creek, which drains Clayton, as the greatest threat to the river’s water.