Ocoee River

About the River

The Ocoee starts high in the Blue Ridge Mountains of north Georgia, where it's called the Toccoa River, and picks up the Ocoee name once it crosses into Tennessee. Ninety-three miles later it empties into the Hiwassee River, but the stretch that matters to paddlers is a short, steep gorge controlled by three TVA dams. Most of the natural riverbed here runs dry: two of those dams send nearly all their water down wooden flumes bolted to the canyon wall instead of the channel, straight to hydroelectric powerhouses. The whitewater only shows up when TVA opens the gates and lets water back into the riverbed, on purpose, on a schedule. That same engineered channel is why the Ocoee hosted the canoe slalom events at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, still the only natural river ever used for an Olympic whitewater competition.

Two sections do nearly all the work. The Middle Ocoee is the most heavily rafted commercial stretch of whitewater in the country: a nearly continuous run of Class III-IV rapids with a short flatwater breather called the Doldrums about halfway down. The Upper Ocoee opens with a tangle of Class II tree-dodging before dropping into the old Olympic course itself, tighter and more technical water that closes to commercial trips at lower flows than the Middle. On days TVA isn't releasing, both sections sit dry or reduced to a trickle, while Parksville Lake and the milder Lower Ocoee below Dam No. 1 keep running for tubing and family floating.

The only USGS gauge on the river sits near Copperhill, upstream of all three dams, so it tracks natural inflow into the system, not whether TVA is releasing water downstream. It's not a reliable way to guess if the whitewater is running. The release schedule below is the real answer, and TVA's own calendar is the source to double-check before you drive out.