Day Trips from Blue Ridge

Half an hour over the line is the most unusual thing within reach of Blue Ridge, and almost nobody on holiday here goes to see it.

Copper ore was found in this basin in 1843 and commercial mining began in 1847. For over a century it was one of the great copper districts of the eastern United States, and during the Civil War it supplied something like ninety per cent of the Confederacy's copper. The damage was done by the smelting rather than the digging. Ore was roasted in open heaps, the sulphur dioxide that came off it turned to acid, the acid killed the vegetation, and whatever trees survived were cut to fuel the furnaces. Around 32,000 acres of a roughly 60,000-acre basin ended up as bare, gullied red ground with nothing growing on it. Photographs from the period look like another planet, and for a long time the bare basin was reputedly visible from orbit.

Then it was put back. Replanting started in 1939 with the TVA and the mining companies working together, a Civilian Conservation Corps camp arrived in 1941 to lime the acid soil, and the work continued for decades. The last mine closed in 1987. The slopes around Ducktown and Copperhill today carry young, even-aged forest, which is why they look subtly different from the ragged old woods on the Georgia side.

The Ducktown Basin Museum, set up in 1978 and moved in 1982 into the old Tennessee Copper Company headquarters on the Burra Burra mine site, is where the story is told properly. It is a rainy-day trip with genuine substance, and it is the best thing to do within an hour of here on a day the weather has cancelled everything else.

Two of the biggest names in southern Appalachian walking are inside about an hour and a quarter, and they are connected.

Amicalola Falls drops 729 feet in a series of cascades and is the highest waterfall in Georgia. The name is Cherokee and is usually translated as tumbling waters. It sits in a state park in Dawson County, and the great advantage of it for a family day is that the payoff does not require a hike: there is road and stair access to viewing platforms, and you can see the thing properly in a couple of hours. The stairs alongside the falls are a real climb, and doing them both ways is a genuine leg workout rather than a stroll.

From the visitor centre at that park, the Appalachian Approach Trail runs 8.5 miles north to Springer Mountain, 3,770 feet, in Fannin and Gilmer counties. Springer has been the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail since 1958, when it was moved from Mount Oglethorpe because development was creeping up on the old start. Every northbound thru-hiker begins there, and in March and early April you will meet a great many of them.

You can also drive most of the way. Forest Service Road 42 crosses the trail about nine tenths of a mile north of the summit, which turns the pilgrimage into a short walk. Two cautions. FS 42 is a long gravel road that takes real care in a low car. And the Appalachian Trail Conservancy asks people to start from Amicalola instead, because vehicles overcrowding that trailhead can block emergency access.

The Benton MacKaye Trail, nearly 300 miles of it, starts from the same summit and runs west. It is the quieter of the two, and it crosses the Toccoa twice within the county.

All of this sits inside the Chattahoochee National Forest, which covers 751,069 acres across eighteen north Georgia counties and was proclaimed a separate national forest on 9 July 1936. Two parts of it are worth a full day from here.

The Cohutta Wilderness, west of Blue Ridge, is one of the largest wilderness areas in the eastern United States at roughly 37,000 acres, with something like ninety miles of trail in it and essentially nothing else. No road crosses it. Federal wilderness designation means no vehicles, no bicycles, no chainsaws and no signposting of the kind you get in a state park. The Jacks River and Conasauga River trails are the classic routes and both involve repeated wading, which is a serious matter in cold water and after rain. Go prepared, go with a map and a compass rather than a phone, and tell somebody where you are going. This is the one day trip on this page that can go badly wrong.

Brasstown Bald is the opposite: Georgia's highest point at 4,784 feet, reached by a road to a car park and then a steep paved half-mile to a 360-degree observation deck. On a clear day you can see into four states. On the other days, which are many, you will pay to walk up into cloud. Check the webcam or the forecast before committing an hour and a quarter of driving to it, and go in the morning before the haze builds.

Both are at their best in the second half of October, and both are considerably harder to park at then.