Blue Ridge Attractions: What Is Actually Here

The depot on Depot Street is the reason Blue Ridge exists at all. The town was laid out in 1886 when the Marietta and North Georgia Railroad reached this point, and the county seat moved here from Morganton nine years later because of it. The building is now the boarding point for the excursion train and the anchor of the whole downtown.

The Blue Ridge Scenic Railway has run since 1998 on track that the Georgia Northeastern Railroad still uses for freight, which is why the ride feels like a working railway rather than an attraction built to look like one. The route is 26 miles there and back along the Toccoa to McCaysville and Copperhill. The standard excursion takes about four hours, of which roughly two are a layover in the twin towns; a shorter express without the layover runs on selected dates.

Allow a full half day including parking and the walk to the platform. Open-air cars are the better seat and the colder one. Autumn dates are the first thing in the county to sell out, so book the train before you book dinner, a tour or anything else that weekend.

Ten minutes north of the depot on GA 5, Mercier Orchards has been worked by the same family since 1943 and grows more than forty varieties of apple. It is the second-busiest place in the county and on an October Saturday it may be the first.

Three things happen there. The market and bakery run year-round, and the fried pies and cider doughnuts are what the queue is for. The cidery presses, ferments and cans hard cider on the property, which the farm says no other Georgia orchard does. And u-pick opens when a crop is actually ready: strawberries in late spring, blueberries and blackberries in summer, peaches, then apples from late summer through autumn.

The constraint is the calendar and the car park. U-pick fields close when they have been picked over, sometimes at short notice, so check what is open the week you travel rather than assuming apples in October means apples on your Saturday. And the turn-in from GA 5 backs up badly in leaf season. A weekday visit, or the first hour of the day, is a genuinely different experience from a Saturday lunchtime.

Lake Blue Ridge is a reservoir rather than a natural lake. The Blue Ridge Dam across the Toccoa was completed in 1930 and the lake has long been managed by the TVA. It covers around 3,300 acres with somewhere between sixty and sixty-five miles of shoreline, and the striking thing about it is how little is built on that shoreline: most of the bank is Chattahoochee National Forest, so from a boat you see trees rather than houses.

Morganton Point, on the north shore, is the Forest Service's day-use and camping area, with the county's established swimming beach. The Blue Ridge Lake Marina is where boats are rented and launched. The dam itself is worth the short detour for the view down the tailwater, where the river runs cold and clear below the outflow.

The constraint here is the one visitors most often miss. Full summer pool is around 1,686 feet, and the lake is drawn down roughly twenty feet over winter. From late autumn until spring, the water is well below the docks in every photograph you have seen, boat ramps can be unusable, and the marina is not on a year-round schedule. For a lake day, come between late spring and early autumn.

Twenty to twenty-five minutes north on GA 5, McCaysville, Georgia and Copperhill, Tennessee sit on opposite sides of the state line and function as a single small town of a few thousand people. The border runs diagonally through the middle of it, the street grid follows the river rather than the boundary, and a blue line painted across the pavement marks where one state stops and the other starts. Standing with a foot in each and having the photograph taken is the local tradition, and it is what most of the scenic railway's passengers do with their layover.

The river does something similar. The Toccoa flows fifty-six miles through Georgia and becomes the Ocoee at exactly this point, which is a rare thing for an American river to do and the reason whitewater guides and trout anglers talk about two different waters that are physically the same one.

This is also copper country. The basin around Copperhill and Ducktown was mined and smelted for more than a century, and the landscape carries the history. The towns themselves are a couple of hours of shopfronts, a river bridge and lunch, not a full day. Arrive by train if you can; parking is easier at the depot end.

The largest attraction in Fannin County is not a site but a land holding: roughly 106,000 acres of the Chattahoochee National Forest, wrapped around the lake and the river and rising south toward the Appalachian crest.

Springer Mountain, at 3,770 feet on the Fannin and Gilmer county line, has been the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail since 1958, when the end point was moved from Mount Oglethorpe because of development. The Benton MacKaye Trail, nearly three hundred miles of white diamond blazes, begins about a third of a mile north of the same summit and follows the westerly line through these mountains that MacKaye first imagined for the AT. The approach trail from Amicalola Falls State Park is 8.5 miles, which is why so many thru-hikers start their walk to Maine with a day they had not expected.

For shorter legs, Fall Branch Falls off Stanley Creek Road is a short steep walk to a real waterfall, and Long Creek Falls, about a mile from Three Forks where the AT and BMT run together, is the best modest hike in the county. The Aska Adventure Area between the lake and the river gives you loops of an hour or a day without a gravel epic to reach the start.

Forest roads to all of these are unpaved. Forest Service 42 to Springer takes far longer than a map suggests.