Up an unassuming but appropriately named “Pump Road” is a surprisingly unique hike to the Toccoa sewage system raw water pumping station. The hike down is on a gravel service road, which is an easy surface going at an easy incline if you did something stupid the day before by chance and need to take it easy (hint, hint). The bottom of the road is a series of picturesque ponds and swampy lowland that the pumping station pumps out of. Daffodils on the adjacent hillside mark a long lost homesite, the dam, pump house, and old sidewalks are gently being retaken by time. A heron swoops over the water, frog spawn hatch, and a flock of Ring Necked ducks overwintering on the ponds paddle away with deep suspicion if you approach too closely.
And if that isn’t enough you can always bushwhack a short ways up the creek to a rather nice waterfall.
Is it goat approved? Horses have travelled here. Someday I will be back with a goat for a longer exploration.
How you get there: The gate/start of the road you walk down is located at 34.640720, -83.389939. There’s a tiny pull off for maybe 2 cars if you squeeze. Otherwise, realize the county will tow your car if you park in front of that gate, and if you park in the road the rednecks may tow it too. I will say that Google seems to think the road into the parking area has a different name. It’s Pump Road. Ignore Google’s naming convention and just turn when it tells you to.
Time for the hike: Down to the ponds is 0.9 mi one way, so out and back with some distance for pond exploration and the falls it’s probably about 2.5 mi max.
Best season to do this hike: Cold weather. The swamp is a buggy snakey place when it warms up.
Trails to Take
You start at the big yellow heavy gates at the top of the gravel road, then go down the road behind them. It’s an easy, but continuous drop along a creek with a few not particularly scenic (but nice sounding) falls as you descend. The road bottoms out at the pumping station, and a couple of small interconnected ponds rich in bird life and with possible signs of other water loving reptilian and mammalian life in the vicinity. It’s peaceful and serene. The dam can be walked over to by an old sidewalk from the pumping station, but if you want to visit the daffodils on the far side of the hill you have to go through the truck crossing, which when I visited was about waste deep in the center. Not a lot of fun in 40F, so that exploration will have to happen on another day.
You can see Filmy Fern Falls from the road when you walked in, shortly before reaching the ponds. There is no trail out to the falls – you will have to do a significant (if not particularly long) bushwhack to go out to the base (what there is of it) of the falls. It’s pretty, and it’s a substantial flow of water, but honestly I didn’t find it rewarding enough for the bushwhack required to get there. The real gem for me was all the bird life out on the ponds.
Anyway, once you’re done wishing you had a camera with real zoom to take a photo of that heron, it’s time to walk back, slowly, to the car.
The gate
Dam with hill with daffodils growing on it on the other side
In Sum: I have never seen Ring Necked ducks before. They are pretty cool. Hopefully nobody comes around and eats them.
packgoats 