Chestatee

The Chestatee River rises in the Chattahoochee National Forest and runs down through the north Georgia mountains near Dahlonega — gold-rush country, where the first major American gold rush began in 1828, two decades before California. The river was worked hard for gold in the nineteenth century; today it runs clear through the foothills, a quiet mountain stream where the mining once tore up the banks.

Photographed in 2010 in black and white during a trip through the southern mountains. The Chestatee is gentler country than the gorges — wooded, rolling, the water moving easily over a rocky bed — and it has a calm that the more dramatic rivers don't.