Upper Chattahoochee – Sautee Creek to Highway 255 bridge
This is the second of three trip diaries on a weekend canoe run of the Chattahoochee River. I hope these articles will guide others to canoeing the Chattahoochee. The first installment was titled “Upper Chattahoochee River in canoe, with dog.”
Sautee, Ga., is a cute little cluster of buildings on a fork in the road four miles southeast of the tourist’s overdose known as Helen. It’s also a rock’s throw away from the put-in for the first stretch of the Chattahoochee River that’s actually suited for canoeing.
Phoebe, Peanut and Ellen ride down the Chattahoochee River.
If you get to Sautee by heading east on Georgia Highway 17, take a left onto Highway 255, then an immediate right onto Lovers Lane. A couple of hundred yards to the east, you’ll cross Sautee Creek. There’s a dirt road to the right and a small parking area just after the bridge.
My paddling companion, Alex, and I walked down the dirt road for a bit to make sure there weren’t any trees down across the narrow, muddy waterway. After the previous night’s storm, it wouldn’t be surprising to find one. And if a tree had fallen all the way across the creek, we might have wanted to put-in downstream from the hazard.
But we lucked out. Muddy water was moving at a pretty good clip down the creek, but there didn’t appear to be any trees across it.
Because we didn’t get on the road in Atlanta until nearly 10, it was now almost noon. We unloaded the canoes. Alex and the dogs waited at the put-in, while Ellen and I ran a quick, six-mile shuttle and left her car near the next bridge on the Chattahoochee River (also on Highway 255). [I’ve biked this shuttle in the past and; though it’s a bit hilly, it’s not a bad ride and the shoulders are nice and wide. It's a nice way to run a shuttle.]
Ellen and I came back in my car and slid the boats down a muddy bank into the water. Alex was eager to get into his yellow kayak, so he squirmed in and started skittering around. Ellen got Phoebe, her hound dog, into her canoe, and Phoebe stood with her front feet on the bow seat. She commenced to howling — Phoebe, that is, not Ellen.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you,” Ellen said. “That’s what Phoebe does the whole time in the canoe. I hope you can take it, because you’re going to have to listen to her all weekend.”
As Ellen launched, I lured Peanut with a snack into my bow. She immediately assumed the precise possion of Phoebe, with her front feet on the bow, but thankfully she didn’t begin howling.
The Sautee, which may be 20 feet wide, winds between steep banks, before snaking under the two-lane highway bridge. Less than a quarter-mile from our put-in, it meets the Chattahoochee River. At that point the Hooch is a pastoral stream. It widens a bit as it ambles southeasterly down the broad Nacoochee Valley, which is best known for an ancient Indian burial mound, visible from the road a mile or so upstream from where we were.
The mound sits in the middle of a field and is topped by a gazebo, which is more than 100 years old — but not as old as the mound. The Nacoochee Valley actually has some of the oldest Native American artifacts in North Georgia. Arrowheads and beads found in the area go back hundreds if not thousands of years. Much later, the valley was part of the Cherokee Nation.
Then, in 1828, whites found gold in the area — according to most accounts along nearby Dukes Creek, a tributary that enters just upstream from Sautee Creek. That find launched the United States’ first real gold rush, which led to the forced removal of the Cherokees to Oklahoma in the Trail of Tears.
Now, the Nacoochee Valley provides a pretty and pastoral — if not exactly wild — landscape. Through this stretch, the river offers gentle pools interspersed with mild shoals that allow novice (and rusty) canoeists to practice their strokes, to turn the boat sideways for waterbed rides over tiny waves, to catch little eddies and to drift back out into the current as the boats leapfrog each other down the river on a beautiful, mild spring day. Or you can just drift and occasionally rudder.
The water was just the right height for a fun run. Overnight, the nearby USGS gauge near Cleveland, Georgia, put the river’s volume at 2,000 cubic feet per second, which would have forced us to move so quickly that we wouldn’t have had time to relax. This level was perfect: Quick enough to keep us moving even if we didn’t stick our paddles in the water, but not so insistent that we would have called it pushy.
Around one bend, we found a jumble of wood that reached all the way across the river. A big tree had fallen, and now other logs were jammed up against it. But we had plenty of time to pull over and take a close look at it. Would we have to carry around? Nah. There was an opening. Ellen walked with the dogs downstream, while I guided my boat through the branches, then I watched the dogs while Ellen and Alex made their ways through.
The most excitement on this stretch was provided by Peanut, who couldn’t stand the fact that her pal Phoebe, along with Ellen and Alex, weren’t together with us in the same boat. She seemed excited to be on the water but so worried that the pack wasn’t together than she started balancing on all for legs on the gunwale rails and the very bow of the boat.
Finally, she realized her predicament, tried to get down and plopped clumsily into the cold water. It was Peanut’s first swim, and she did find — looked a bit shocked at how cold the water was, but immediately knew how to doggie paddle. And once she got over the confusion of which way to go, she realized that she should head right back toward me. I yanked her up by her harness, but she needed surprisingly little help scrambling into the boat.
Budda-budda-bup. Do that doggie shake and shimmy to drive off. Walk around excitedly in the middle of the canoe, head back up to the bow … and start whining again .
A mile downstream from the confluence with the Sautee, rocky outcrops squeeze in on the river, which tightens just a tad. There are small mountains on both sides, but the rapids are still very mild – Class I and the mildest Class II, which means that everything’s an open shoot.
In this kind of water, you head straight for the downstream-pointing “V’s” – open channels that end in a series of friendly little waves. And if you want to slow down or play with the current, or want to watch the young kayaker who’s with you play on the waves, you just point the nose of the boat at a 10 o’clock or 2 o’clock angle into the little eddies that form behind any sizable rock. The backward current that’s circling around to fill in the space behind the rock will catch your boat, as well. With a couple of simple strokes with your paddle, you’re suddenly effortlessly pointing upstream — and the dog, who suddenly thinks this canoeing stuff is quite interesting, is grooving with the ride, watching Alex follow behind us, and enjoying the sunny day.
I last road this stretch in 1992 — I can place the date by the girlfriend I took along — and I remember remarking to her that I was disappointed to see so many summer homes along the way. As far as I know, this entire stretch of river always has been in private hands. In the old days, that meant the wide valleys were the settled parts, while the steeper stretches — I wouldn’t quite call this part of the river a gorge — were thick with green: Mountain laurel lining the river banks, and oak and pine forests climbing up to the ridgetops.
But better roads put this part of Georgia a half hour outside Gainesville, and less than an hour from Alpharetta. Ambitious developers began to stripe the hills with suburban-style cul de sacs, and to drop dream homes on the ridges. Spectacular views for them, a less pristine river corridor for us.
Just as more houses have popped up over time, more pop up as you move downstream on the river — toward Atlanta. But all that settlement couldn’t detract from the splendid day. The narrower river and slightly bigger drops made the rapids more playful.
Phoebe kept baying. Peanut fell in the water one more time. Ellen hooked up her canoe to mine so we could have a snack. And Alex looked more and more comfortable playing in the waves — almost as comfortable as his uncle did in a kayak on this very same stretch more than three decades ago.
On that day, his uncle and I were just a couple of years older than Alex now is. Despite the new houses, the river hadn’t changed nearly as much as I had.
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