Start near: Tallahassee (about 55 min to Bainbridge) · Montgomery (about 1 h 55 min to Columbus)
the river border nobody drives
The Chattahoochee Trace is a ~180-mile back-roads route from Columbus to Bainbridge on US 27 and GA 39, driven in 2 days, that stays off I-75 (by 90 miles) through the Deep South.
The Georgia-Alabama river border below Columbus is the emptiest quarter of both states, which is exactly the appeal. It packs the strangest art site in the South (St. EOM's Pasaquan), a canyon Georgia farmed into existence by accident, a frontier fort on a bluff, mounds older than most of the hemisphere's cities, and Colquitt, a town that turned its own oral history into a long-running folk play called Swamp Gravy.
📍 Chattahoochee Trace heritage markers; Kolomoki's museum is built into the mound itself.
The whitewater city, then Buena Vista's visionary compound and the pink gullies of Providence Canyon.
The city blew its dams and made the Chattahoochee downtown into what's billed as the longest urban whitewater course in the world. Rafts leave from the RiverWalk.
St. EOM's seven-acre visionary compound of painted totems and pagoda walls, restored by the Kohler Foundation. Nothing else in the South looks remotely like it.
Georgia's Little Grand Canyon: 150-foot painted gullies carved entirely by 19th-century farming erosion. The state's prettiest cautionary tale.
GA 39 hugging the impoundments south past Georgetown to the frontier bluff.
An 1816 frontier fort site on a high bluff over the river, replica blockhouse and cannon included.
Kolomoki's mounds, Blakely's peanut pride, Colquitt's murals and the Flint River port town.
One of the Southeast's oldest great mound complexes, its museum built into an excavated burial mound. Woodland-era, and older than it has any right to feel.
Georgia's official folk-life play, staged by the town from its own oral histories since the early '90s, in the Mayhaw Capital of the World.
A courthouse-square obelisk to the peanut, raised in 1954 by a county that means it.
The Chattahoochee Trace is about 180 miles and takes 2 days at a back-roads pace.
It runs from Columbus to Bainbridge.
It follows US 27 and GA 39.
It avoids I-75 (by 90 miles), using US 27 and GA 39 instead.
7 stops are mapped, including Columbus Whitewater, Pasaquan, Providence Canyon, Fort Gaines bluff and Kolomoki Mounds.
The atlas’s seasonal note for this route: “Mayhaw jelly peaks in spring; Colquitt's festival sells out of it fast.”
Connects with: The Old Federal Road · Plains & Andersonville · US 84: Wiregrass to Mockingbird
More in the Deep South: The Blues Highway · Natchez Trace Parkway · Grant's Vicksburg Campaign · The Civil Rights Trail · The Hill Country Ramble · Hank's Lost Highway · Sherman to the Swamp · US 11: The Valley South · The Shoals · The Black Belt & Gee's Bend · The Old Federal Road · US 84: Wiregrass to Mockingbird · The Free State of Jones · US 49: Jackson to the Sound · Sherman's March to the Sea · US 41: Dixie Highway & the Atlanta Campaign · Plains & Andersonville · US 341: The Golden Isles Highway · North Georgia Gold & Apples · The Trail of Tears: Georgia to Kentucky