Chattooga Wild & Scenic River Guide

The Chattooga is the crown jewel of Southern whitewater, and it earned its fame the hard way — this is the gorge where Deliverance was filmed in 1972, right down to the stunt paddling. It became the first federally designated Wild & Scenic River in the Southeast in 1974, which is why a quarter-mile of dense forest walls both banks the whole way down: no roads, no houses, no cell signal, just the river doing what it’s done for ten thousand years. Section III (Class I–III, with the optional Class IV plunge at Bull Sluice) is the family run; Section IV is eight miles of the hardest commercial whitewater in the region, stacked with the notorious Five Falls. Don’t be the one who books Section IV to impress somebody and then swims Corkscrew in November water — the outfitters set minimum ages and flow limits for a reason.