Hiking Cane Creek Falls

Georgia Travelog #14
Dahlonega - Friday, 11 Apr 2025, 11:30am

Our first hike of what we hope will be several today took us to a small religious retreat near Dahlonega, Georgia. [Ed: this is one of at least 7 blogs from last week delayed in my backlog that I just now have time to publish.] As advised by fellow hikers using the AllTrails app we called ahead to make sure visitors were permitted to enter today. We are, though only until 3pm. I'm glad we figured that out at 9am, as our plan as of that point had been to do this hike last during the day, meaning we wouldn't have gotten here until probably about 5pm.



We parked at the visitors center, went inside to introduce ourselves— since it's private property— and then returned to the car to lace up our boots for the short trek. At less than 1/2 mile each way it's so short it almost doesn't qualify as a hike.

We started down the short trail to the top of the falls. Down to the viewing platform at the top it's a gravel trail wide enough for vehicles. Beyond that, a footpath loops around across the creek and down the side to the bottom.



One benefit of being here early— we arrived just after 10:30— is that we've had the falls nearly to ourselves. One other pair of hikers were in the wide canyon beneath the falls when we started. Some time after they left a mom with two you girls arrived.



From the left side of the falls where the trail descends the canyon we crossed on a footbridge over to the right. Then I carefully tread across a shallow section of the creek to reach an island in the middle. That's where I made the first two photos in this blog. Then I retraced my steps through the shallows, careful not to let the water overtop my boots, and came back across the bridge to climb back up the side of the canyon.

Hiking Long Creek Falls. Teens, Rain, and Selfies.

Georgia Travelog #15
Three Forks - Friday, 11 Apr 2025, 2:30pm

Our second hike today was visiting Long Creek Falls in the Chattahoochee National Forest. It seemed like it wouldn't be that far from our previous hike at Cane Creek Falls but then we realized our route involved 12-15 miles of driving on Forest Service roads. I..e, dirt roads. It's a good thing our rental vehicle is a crossover with AWD! Though in the past I've driven similar roads with front-wheel drive sedans.

Then again, things started getting a bit tougher on the drive to the trailhead when it began to rain. It was mostly just scattered drizzle while we were driving, but that turned into a steady pour as we arrived. Then it turned into a downpour as we started hiking. It's a good thing we brought our rain jackets today! Indeed we passed some hikers heading back to the car who'd bailed out before reaching the falls because they weren't prepared to hike in the rain.



Long Creek Falls is about a mile in from the Three Forks trailhead. It's a mostly gradual uphill hike the whole way. On the way in we saw a few other smaller falls on the creek with faint unmarked paths leading toward them. We wondered if one of those was our falls. Nope; the spur trail to the main falls was marked with a sign and blazes.

As we got to the falls there were about a dozens teens with a few adult chaperones there ahead of us. My first thought was Ugh. Teens can be noisy and chaotic and often don't care about the thing they're standing in front of. Frequently they're there because their parents forced them. These teens turned out to be fairly well behaved, though. They were part of a church group, and those who came on this trek did so because they wanted to. Thus they weren't doing things out of abject boredom like throwing every loose rock into the water and holding contests for who can scream the loudest. They also weren't whining incessantly about the rain. Though I think partly that's because they'd already been through way worse.... This church group wasn't day-hiking like us; they'd done an overnight atop the mountain. An overnight in a shelter while rain and sleet pounded with thunder and lightning last night! Thus when we arrived at the falls and wanted to take pictures, they politely made room for us.



If the teens were low energy because they were shell-shocked from laying awake most of the night during the violent weather (that's what one of their chaperones said) we were a bit low energy, too, because it was still raining and dreary. But still, waterfalls are waterfalls, so it wasn't hard to crack a legit smile or two while there.

You might wonder why the one falls pictures I've shared here is a selfie, especially after I included a selfie among other pictures from Cane Creek Falls earlier today and Amicalola Falls yesterday. Have I become one of those people who shares everything as a selfie? Haha, no. It's just a coincidence of a few circumstances.

One of those circumstances, a pretty significant one, is that I forgot my camera this trip. My spiffy, interchangeable lens camera, that is. Instead I'm taking all my pictures with my iPhone.

One of the things an iPhone (or any reasonable modern smartphone) does well is selfies. I like to explore the capabilities of whatever photographic tool I'm using. On some trips I shoot a lot of video when I'm using my iPhone. This trip I'm prompting myself, "Ooh, let's try a selfie here." So that's piece #2 of circumstance.

Piece #3 of circumstance is that a number of these selfies are simply good photos. When I review my roll of pictures after a trip I pick my favorites based on composition, lighting, focus, color saturation, mood, and story. Yes, that's a) a lot of factors and b) a mixture of technical and artistic considerations. Photography is a mixture of technical and artistic considerations. Selfies I've taken these past few hikes have been among the pictures I've liked best. And that's both technical and artistic. Technical, because the selfie camera on my new phone (6 months old) is way better than on older phones. It's able to deliver far better resolution, focus, light balance, and color saturation than selfies with older phones. In fact the selfie camera on this phone is at least as good as the outward facing camera on my previous phone. And artistic, because switching from traditional photos to selfies opens a new dimension of composition and story.

Long story short, I'm having fun exploring selfies, and I'm sharing a few selfie photos because they happen to be really good photos regardless.