Mountain Blog
Stories, guides, and insights about life in the North Georgia mountains
Featured Stories
The Cartecay
If you spend any time in Ellijay, you start noticing the word before you've learned what it belongs to. It's on the brewery on River Street. It's on the bike shop up North Main. It's on the vineyard out Clear Creek Road. It's the name of a loop trail, a pizza place, a fishing report, a church, a road, a subdivision, a dozen businesses that came and went before the current ones showed up. Half of downtown borrowed the name. You don't need a guide to figure out it must mean something.
A Local's Guide to Ellijay's Orchards & Vineyards
Ellijay, Georgia has earned its nickname as the Apple Capital of Georgia the old-fashioned way — one family-run orchard at a time, for nearly a century. Somewhere along the way, the same rolling foothills that turned out to be perfect for apples turned out to be pretty good for grapes, too. The result is a small mountain town with an unusually rich mix of orchards and vineyards, most of them still run by the families who planted them. This guide covers the established orchards and vineyards in and around Ellijay that have a strong public presence — all of them operate year-round or by season, all of them welcome visitors, and all of them are easy to find on a map. Think of it less as a ranked list and more as a local's cheat sheet: where to go, what to order, and when to show up.
Recent Posts
Night Sky
The thing about living here is that you forget. You carry the groceries in from the car, the porch light is on, the dog wants out, you're thinking about dinner. Then one night in November you happen to step out to the driveway without the porch light, and you glance up, and the sky stops you where you stand.
The Drive Up 515
There's a moment on the drive up, usually somewhere past Jasper, where the city finally lets go of you. You can feel it happen. The radio's still on, the coffee's still warm, the dog in the back seat hasn't moved in thirty minutes — and then the ridgelines start stacking up through the windshield and your shoulders drop a half inch and you realize you haven't been breathing quite right since you left Atlanta.
Before the Apples
Everyone comes to Ellijay in October. They come for the orchards and the cider donuts and the hayrides and the hoodies, and they're not wrong to. October earns every bit of attention it gets. But the best week in Ellijay — the one nobody's posting about, the one that passes most years without a line at the stoplight — is the week the orchards bloom.
Meet the Makers: A Guide to Ellijay's Shops, Galleries & Local Artisans
Spend a Saturday walking the square in downtown Ellijay and you'll notice something right away: most of the shops you'll step into are owned by the people behind the counter. The antiques dealer restocking her booth. The boutique owner steaming a new dress. The artist hanging a show. The pharmacist who's known three generations of your friend's family by name. There are plenty of pretty mountain towns in North Georgia — but the ones where the town itself is still made by hand are rarer than they used to be.
Spring in Ellijay: When the Apple Capitol Wakes Up
There is a specific morning every year in Ellijay when you can feel the whole town exhale. The dogwoods along Dalton Street start to bloom. The apple houses on Highway 52 flip their "Open" signs over for the season. Someone at a coffee shop downtown mentions that the trout are biting on the Cartecay, and by lunchtime half the county knows it. Spring in the apple capital of Georgia is less a season than a community event, and if you live here — or if you're lucky enough to visit — it's hard not to get swept up in it.
Where to Eat in Ellijay: A Local's Restaurant Guide
For a town this size, Ellijay punches well above its weight when it comes to food. Walk the downtown square on a Friday night and you'll smell wood smoke from one direction, wood-fired pizza from another, and live music drifting out from a third. Locals have strong, specific opinions about breakfast biscuits and burger buns here — and most of those opinions are earned.
Hiking in Ellijay: A Local's Guide to the Best Trails
If Ellijay has a secret, it's that the hiking here rivals anything in better-known parts of the North Georgia mountains — without the crowds. You can stand under a 100-foot-tall tulip poplar that dates back to before logging came through. You can stroll a lakeside loop that's flat enough for a stroller and pretty enough to post. You can chase waterfalls off a gravel road most visitors never find. And you can do most of it within a thirty-minute drive of downtown.
A Weekend in Ellijay
Somewhere around the last exit off 515, the traffic thins, the ridgelines pile up, and you remember why you made the drive. Ellijay doesn't announce itself the way other mountain towns do. It doesn't need to. The apple orchards, the rivers, the square — they've been here for a hundred years, waiting for whoever shows up with an open Saturday. Here's how to spend forty-eight hours in it.