Upper Chattahoochee River

The Chattahoochee is born in a spring on the flank of Jacks Knob at about 3,000 feet, tumbles past Horse Trough Falls, and runs maybe eight miles of pocket water before it ever reaches the Bavarian-kitsch town of Helen. That headwater stretch is a genuine southern-Appalachian freestone trout stream — a boulder-strewn, rhododendron-lined creek you can step across in places — and it has nothing to do with the wide, cold Buford Dam tailwater carrying the same name through Atlanta's suburbs sixty miles downstream. Up high in the Chattahoochee Wildlife Management Area it holds wild rainbows and browns in the plunge pools and native brook trout — "specks" — in the coldest feeder branches. Drainage area at the Helen gauge is only 44.7 square miles, so this is small water: it typically runs in the 45-95 CFS range and spikes hard and dirty after a mountain thunderstorm, then drops back within a day or two.

It fishes like a mountain creek, because it is one. Above Helen the play is short bow-and-arrow casts and high-sticked nymphs into pockets, or a dry-dropper drifted through the seams behind boulders — 3- or 4-weight rods, 5-6X, and stealth, because the wild fish spook off a bad approach in gin-clear low water. Through Helen and down toward Nacoochee the river opens up, warms, and shifts to a put-and-take stocker fishery: Georgia's Wildlife Resources Division drops rainbows in regularly from late March through October, and on a summer weekend you're sharing the water with tubers drifting out of Robertstown. The season swings the whole personality of the place — spring is prime with hatches stacking up and freshly stocked fish, fall fishes well once the crowds thin and terrestrials are on, and by August the small upper branches run low and warm enough that the trout tuck into shade and spring seeps.

The regulatory line that matters most is the GA Alternate Highway 75 bridge at Robertstown, just above Helen. From that bridge downstream the river is open year-round; upstream into the WMA it is a seasonal trout stream — one of the few reaches Georgia kept on the old calendar when it moved most of the state to year-round access. Access is genuinely public and good: the Chattahoochee National Forest owns the headwaters, GA 75 and the gravel Chattahoochee River Road (FS 44) parallel the water with pull-offs, and the Upper Chattahoochee River Campground sits a mile below the source. Nearby, Smith Creek (a Delayed Harvest tributary in Unicoi State Park) and Dukes Creek (trophy catch-and-release in Smithgall Woods) round out a very fishable weekend based out of Helen.