My first real introduction to the mountains of North Georgia came when I got to Graduate School in Athens, in the fall of 1973. I came up for an orientation session a few days before classes started, and had dinner that first night at The Spaghetti House, downtown, across from campus.

Even though I had lived on campus for three prior years as an undergraduate, I had never been there before. I’m not sure why. Probably couldn’t afford it. I don’t remember going there much after this visit. I had very little money back then.

My good luck started that night when I met my server, a young woman from Athens named Denise, who had just graduated from Clarke Central High School, and was an incoming freshman at UGA. We unexpectedly hit it off, and got to be close friends that year. For which I was very glad. She is an extraordinary person. We have kept in touch ever since.

Denise was a very talented budding artist, with a gentle spirit, an open mind, and a strong sense of humor – much like me. Through her I later met and got to be good friends with a classmate of hers named Randy, who turned out to be a very talented dancer, and, later, a mime, who studied in Paris for a year or two. I was very glad to make their acquaintance. He was an extraordinary person, and like a brother to me. Major improvement to my “friends list!”

I had a car that year, my very first -- a small, second-hand, four-cylinder Mercury Capri, which gave me the freedom to do a bit of sightseeing. My prior three years on campus, I had walked everywhere, and did a lot of it, but was limited in how far I could go, because legs only carried one so far.

So when Denise proposed a day trip one Saturday to Helen, “Georgia’s Alpine Village,” I was happy to explore the greater environs a bit. She and Randy and I got in the car and she told me how to get there. Helen was an hour or so north of Athens, and very popular in the fall when the leaves changed colors. I did not know any of that. So that was all a big surprise. And a very welcome one!

I later discovered that Helen was actually a tourist trap of sorts, designed to look like a “Village in the Alps,” so as to bring business to the area. It worked only too well. The entire month of October was one big long “Octoberfest,” based on the German tradition, and the town got swamped, particularly on weekends, just like Tybee Island on the 4th of July. Major traffic jam getting into town! Which I quickly learned to avoid.

We didn’t really tarry in Helen, that day, except to stop at Betty’s Country Store, on the western outskirts of that small town, as we were really heading to Dukes Creek Falls, just outside of town, for a day hike.

Betty’s was a small store, back then, with a smorgasbord of many interesting items. We each got a small bag of dried banana chips from a big jar by the register, and that was something else new to me. They were so good! That was the only place I have seen them. I always went back for more whenever I was back in town.

Dukes Creek was just outside of Helen, on GA 257, also known as the “Richard Russell Scenic Highway,” named after Georgia’s long-serving U.S. Senator, prior to Sam Nunn, who turned out to be equally influential, if not moreso.

That highway was a twisting two-lane mountain road that wound around mountains and valleys, and was indeed a very scenic highway! I have driven it many times since. A short but amazing road. One of Georgia’s finest scenic highways.

The Dukes Creek hiking trail was a “Z” shaped switch-back trail cut into the side of the mountain along Dukes Creek Falls – an easy hike to the bottom of the falls. (The Park Service later re-did it, for some reason, and when we went back several years later, I did not recognize it. I don’t really know why they did that.)

At the bottom of the falls were a couple of pools, and one of them had a fallen tree branch sticking out of it, with what looked like a face on the end – eyes, ears and nose. It startled us when we first saw it, as it looked like a big snake, peering out at us! I took a couple of pictures of it with my little Kodak 110 Instamatic camera, and laughingly referred to it later as the “Loch Ness Monster of Duke Creek Falls.” One of my favorite pictures from those days.

On another weekend trip there, we actually climbed up a steep narrow path to the top of the falls, and found another pool up there, which we were glad to jump into and cool off a bit.

The view from the top of the falls was spectacular! But the climb back down was much more difficult than the climb up. (Always is! Going down is much harder than climbing up.)

That was our introduction to Raven Cliffs. We later found the entrance to the Raven Cliff Trail, around the corner on the Richard Russell Highway, which was really just an unmarked pull-off. You had to know where it was to find it. But it led to a 3-mile trail to the cliffs, mostly just alongside a meandering stream, that eventually fed the falls. That part was an easy hike. But the view from the top was just amazing.

I’ve been to both places many times since. The palette of fall colors was just astonishing to me. The trees up there displayed many more colors than what I was used to seeing in Savannah; and the vertical scale of them was nothing short of breathtaking.

I later learned that those fall colors were often determined by the amount of summer rains. Drier summers produced more muted fall colors.

What a wonderful introduction to the mountains of north Georgia!

Rafe Semmes is a proud graduate of (“the original”) Savannah High School and the University of Georgia. He and his wife live in eastern Liberty County, with their menagerie of orphan felines, and may be reached at rafe_semmes@yahoo.com.