I had someone ask me about the new picture in the Postcards from the Outback header bar. It’s a picture of Will and Andrew playing in the river left cascade at Bull Sluice on the Chattooga, taken in the interval between our return from Alaska and the beginning of school.
I began taking the boys there last summer on one of those scorching Atlanta days when the only outdoor activity that sounds bearable is swimming. They would gladly have gone to the local pool every day, but I’m frankly bored by the totalitarian conformity of the concrete swimming pool and knew that we could do better. A lot better.
Dad, how ’bout I go with those guys? That looks like fun.
Bull Sluice at full throttle is a pretty fearsome rapid—one that has eaten my lunch more times than I’d care to admit—but as water levels fall and temperatures rise in the summer, the pool below it becomes a popular swimming hole (run this drop upside down in summertime and you’ll have quite an audience). The meat of the main drop is still potentially deadly, a ledge sluiced with potholes to nowhere dropping onto a massive undercut rock affectionately named “Decap,” but stay below all that and you’re golden. It’s easy to get to, maybe too easy (kayaking author/artist William Nealy once wrote that the best thing about Bull Sluice is that you can drive ambulances almost right to it), and it can be quite crowded on weekends, but then so is the pool at our local Y.
For the boys, it has a little bit of everything. They chase fish through the shallows, trying to scoop them up with their sun hats. They search for lizards on the rocks. They investigate little rock slides and plunge pools. They experiment with current. They skip rocks and shovel sand. They pause for the regular entertainment of kayak pods and raft armadas passing through, some successfully and others less so. (They’ve become connoisseurs of raft carnage—I’ve taught them well.) And they can stay all day, protesting when I peel them away after six, seven hours of solid fun.
Will taking the plunge.
Will checks out a spot where you can lie in the current and breathe easily in the air pocket a good hat creates. It looks a little alarming for the onlooker when you sit still, apparently submerged, for minutes at a time, but it’s an amazing sensation.
Needless to say, if Bull Sluice were closer, we’d be there nearly every day in the summer weeks when we aren’t traveling. But alas, the nearly four-hour round trip is something of a deterrent. Do I dare take them just down the street to frolic in the Chattahoochee? For a while, the authorities posted daily e-coli levels, but I think they’ve stopped now due to budget cuts. What a shame that urban kids are effectively sentenced to concrete tubs for neighborhood summer water play. What’s worse, we seem largely content with that.
And so I have a request for my readers. For relatively good water quality, accessibility, and a huge “fun factor,” Bull Sluice gets my vote as the BEST natural swimming hole in the (somewhat) local area, but maybe you’ve got better suggestions? If you’re a reader from afar, what’s the best swimming hole in your local area? The more candidates, the better—and then let us all take our children out to try them. We may never settle on a winner, but then that’s not the point, is it?
I love me a good, out of the way, waterhole to throw myself into. I am a fish in the water and I could spend all day just bobbing around, doing nothing in particular, but pruning up.
I am partial to Jacks River Falls – the hike in keeps some people away – minimum of 4 miles each way via Beech Bottom- but can be part of the adventure – crossing water multiple times on Rice Camp or Jacks River Trail can be almost as much fun as swimming.
With two waterfalls to play in, cliffs and rocks of varying heights to jump off of, and the unmatched raw beauty of the Cohutta to occupy your eyes, we are here at least once a month.
It too can get crowded on a hot Saturday (despite the hike), but go during the week and you have a better than average chance of having it all to yourself.
Jacks River is a good suggestion; I haven’t been there in years and years. Did I hear that USFS closed off the immediate area for camping? I remember Beech Bottom to be a ludicrously easy four miles but don’t think the boys are ready for an eight mile round-trip in a single day.
The area between the rivers is closed for camping, but you can still camp riverside on the opposite sides of either Jacks or the Conasauga – they have gotten pretty strict on number of campers (and even hikers) in the group, no campfires, etc. but the raw beauty of the place makes up for the trouble. The Cohutta is still best place to see a bear or wild boar in the state.
Beech is 4 pretty easy miles, with only moderate ups and downs…but the last .5 mile on Jacks is some pretty crazy rock scrambling for kids – they mostly love it. I have taken two sets of boy scouts in for their first 10 mile hikes – all boys were 10 or 11 and only had a few complaints. I would think that any younger though, you might get some resistance on the way out.
You could walk them in Beech, camp, and walk out Jacks River – with all the river crossings, the miles just sort of disappear, but to do this, you would need two cars as trailheads are probably about 5 miles apart…
Update: I just found the website swimmingholes.info (http://www.swimmingholes.org/index.html). The Georgia page looks full of delicious possibilities.