Rocks of the Blue Ridge Around Helen
A plain-language look at the story written in the cliffs, gorges and gold veins near Helen
The short answer
Walk any trail around Helen and you're walking on rock that has been squeezed, heated, folded and pushed across a continent. The mountains are the worn-down roots of a much bigger range, and you can still read the story in the cliffs at Tallulah Gorge, the granite of Mount Yonah and the creek beds where people once panned for gold.
This is the short version, with the places you can actually go to see each chapter.
The Blue Ridge in brief
Helen sits in the Blue Ridge geologic province, which the New Georgia Encyclopedia describes as Georgia's highest mountain range, running from about 1,600 to 4,700 feet. It is the southernmost end of the Appalachians, covers parts of eleven Georgia counties including White, Habersham and Rabun, and is mostly protected inside the 750,000-acre Chattahoochee National Forest. The range's crest forms the Eastern Continental Divide: the Chattahoochee, near Union and Towns counties, flows to the Gulf; the Chattooga, which feeds the Savannah, flows to the Atlantic.
The Blue Ridge province is also Georgia's wettest region, with higher elevations getting more than 80 inches of rain a year on average. That rain, running down steep slopes, is what carves the waterfalls.
A timeline in rock
| Chapter | What happened | What you can see |
|---|---|---|
| Billion-year-old basement | Ancient crystalline rock forms the deep foundation under the Blue Ridge. | Mostly buried; some pebbles of bluish quartz in younger rocks came from it. |
| About 700 million years ago | The supercontinent Rodinia begins to break up. Sediments pile into basins along the edge of the continent. | Metamorphosed sedimentary rocks, the Ocoee Supergroup, in the western Blue Ridge. |
| Paleozoic collisions | The proto-Atlantic Ocean closes. Pieces of the continental margin are pushed onto the continent along thrust faults. Heat and pressure transform the rock. | Schist, gneiss and migmatite, which carry signs of very high temperatures. |
| About 375 million years ago | Partial melting forms granite magma that intrudes the stacked metamorphic rocks. | The granite of Mount Yonah in White County. |
| End of the Paleozoic | The proto-Atlantic finally closes and southeastern North America collides with northwest Africa, pushing the Blue Ridge 150 km or more onto the continent. | The stacked thrust sheets of the Blue Ridge. |
| Millions of years of erosion | Weathering strips away overlying rock and exposes rocks that were once buried deep. | Brasstown Bald, where Great Smoky rocks show through the surrounding thrust sheet. |
Condensed from the New Georgia Encyclopedia's Blue Ridge Geologic Province article. Dates are approximate.
Rocks you can actually see
Tallulah Gorge: quartzite
A thick section of quartzite, the metamorphic cousin of sandstone, partly rings the Tallulah dome and forms the high steep bluffs of Tallulah Gorge. The gorge is nearly 1,000 feet deep and about 2 miles long. It's about an hour from Helen.
Mount Yonah: granite
Yonah, in White County, is made of granite about 375 million years old. It's the granite mountain that rises above the Nacoochee Valley near Helen.
Migmatite and gneiss
Some eastern Blue Ridge rocks, called migmatites, have both metamorphic and igneous characteristics. They reveal the very high temperatures the rock reached when the mountains were forming.
Brasstown Bald: an erosional window
Erosion has breached the thrust faults here and exposed the older Great Smoky rocks that sit beneath the surrounding sheet. Brasstown Bald is Georgia's highest point at 4,784 feet.
Gold in the hills
Gold formed in the eastern Blue Ridge when hot rocks interacted with water, concentrating the metal in the area that became the Dahlonega gold district. The Georgia gold rush is better known for Dahlonega and Lumpkin County, but nobody is certain where it began. The New Georgia Encyclopedia notes several popular stories, including one in which a man found a three-ounce nugget on Duke's Creek in what is now White County, right next to Helen. The first documented notice of gold in Georgia appeared in a Milledgeville newspaper on August 1, 1829. The Great Intrusion of miners into Cherokee land followed.
Today you can still see the Dukes Creek watershed from the trail to Dukes Creek Falls (a $4 per vehicle day-use area, 2.2 miles round trip). Panning is a different activity; this isn't a spot to count on finding gold.
Where to see it
For a geology-minded day, pair Tallulah Gorge for the quartzite cliffs with Anna Ruby Falls and Dukes Creek Falls for streams cutting through hard rock. Add the view from Brasstown Bald and you'll have crossed a good chunk of the range. For the plants and animals that sit on top of all this rock, see our Southern Appalachian ecology guide.
Related Imagery from Around Helen
