Amicalola

October 4, 2021

Kevin and I stared up at Amicalola Falls. The glistening, mesmerizing white water of Little Amicalola Creek cascaded over a half-dozen rugged ledges toward us from nearly 800 feet above. Other visitors to Amicalola Falls State Park, between Dawsonville and Dahlonega, Ga., stood nearby, like us, transfixed and silent.

We met to hike the park while Kevin’s wife Jean competed in a cycling event nearby. They drove up from Florida. I navigated down from Greenville, S.C., for 60 miles on I-85, then tacked another 100 miles northwest on Georgia roads that pass through rural flatlands to rolling hills to north Georgia’s share of the Blue Ridge. I passed Livonia, Toccoa, Eastanollee, Clarksville, Cleveland. I saw the signs of these places along GA-17, 105, 115, and 52. Graceful, stately courthouses, steepled churches, small farms, a few brick houses and mobile homes, then forest and more forest.

Halfway along, I crossed the Chattahoochee River, which over its 450-mile length flows rapidly down through the center of the state from the northeast mountains toward Atlanta to form Georgia’s border with Alabama, then flow into Florida as the Apalachicola.

Kevin and Jean moved from Virginia to Gulf Coast Florida more than a year ago, as our Northern Virginia running group emigrated to the Southeast. Amicalola, Cherokee for “tumbling waters,” was a logical meeting point. The falls are the third-highest east of the Mississippi, but as you squint from the foot to the summit probably the steepest. The cliff, a dizzying view from the base, is another high point within the North Georgia Mountains. The Appalachian Trail begins, or ends, eight miles away at Singer Mountain.

We climbed the 600 steps from the base to the summit, pausing on the platforms to catch our breath. Amicalola Creek thundered past. We stomped up the last few steps. Below the catwalk the water gathered speed from ledge to ledge. A month ago I had stared at Upper Whitewater Falls, highest in the East on Whitewater River just across the North-South Carolina state line. Amicalola is equally remote and spectacular.

The valley spread out to the south, pale green in the bright morning sunlight, a panorama of this rocky corner of the second-largest Southeastern state (Florida is slightly larger). We headed up the AT approach trail, which winds through rocky forest (what else?), levels for a stretch, then drops quickly before climbing again. A few hikers passed us in both directions, panting and gasping. Eventually we turned and headed back.

I had been through these parts before, to a wedding in Elijay, about 20 miles northwest, and for a running event that started in Blairsville, maybe 30 miles due north but farther on local roads. After the wedding Sandy and I, in a rented compact, ploughed seven miles up a Bureau of Land Management road hacked out of a mountainside to walk a few steps at the AT terminus. I watched for through-hikers. The woods was silent.

Wilderness, rocks, and fast-flowing water are what you get in the huge stretch of the South from North Carolina and East Tennessee down through north-central Georgia. The backroads connect a few remote communities and then more remote settlements hidden, or maybe stuck in mountain woods.

In August I hiked ten miles along the Chattooga River, the wild and lonely but gorgeous whitewater stream that forms the Georgia-South Carolina state line until it flows into Lake Hartwell. The Chattooga was the site of the filming of the scary 1972 movie “Deliverance,” that starred Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds and featured a young boy, Billy Redden, who played the silent banjo virtuoso in the brief segment that became famous as “dueling banjos.” Redden came from Rabun County, Ga., in the rugged mountains of the northeast corner of the state.

The forbidding theme of the movie summoned for many a distorted impression of local people as ignorant, vicious hillbillies. Local political and cultural thinking inclines to hard-right Republican, like the rest of the rural South. But I saw my first “Trump 2024” banner a week earlier not here but in Rosman, N.C., population 576, near the chic touristy city of Brevard. Instead, the source of the film’s impact, the major player, was the mysterious, fearsome power of nature—the crashing, boulder-filled river, jagged peaks, and dense forests, intimidating and haunting, yet virgin and beautiful, that make up the mountain South.

The Blairsville running adventure in 2018, called Cruel Jewel, started in Vogel State Park just south of the North Carolina hamlet of Murphy. The course runs through the Chattahoochee National Forest, which covers 867,000 acres across the northern tier of the state. Cruel Jewel extends through 26 counties to Blue Ridge, Ga., and over a torturous set of five, six, eight sharp peaks called the Dragon’s Spine. I persevered over the Spine once but faded on the second crossing. I left Blairsville remembering the climbing and the rocks, the relentless, dark wildness.

We enjoyed, carefully, the descent from the approach trail. A crowd had gathered at the top of the stair scaffold that crosses the Creek, where park visitors snapped photos of the white water rushing over the rocks and considered whether to make the trek. We took the longer route, winding through a pretty, tamer woodland down the mountainside.

We headed for Dahlonega (Dah-LON-ega), 20 miles east, site of North Georgia University, a military school. Students wandered the campus in cammies. A town square anchored by the Dahlonega Gold Museum offered coffee shops and cafes, crowded with college kids. No one wore masks. We got a quick lunch then said so long, Kevin headed off to meet Jean. My legs felt like rubber as I poked along east for two hours to the interstate, then northeast to South Carolina’s gentler hills.