Hogpen Gap is the sort of name that sounds like a joke until you ride up to it. It is a notch in the crest of the Blue Ridge in the Chattahoochee National Forest, in north Georgia, where the Richard B. Russell Scenic Highway, State Route 348, crests the ridge and drops down the far side. The road is named for a long-serving senator from the state, and it is one of the few in Georgia that feels like a real mountain pass, with a good deal of rock, dark rhododendron thickets and the smell of damp hardwood leaves.
From the Helen side it is a proper climb. The highway goes up through tight, quick bends, some of them hairpins, with steep wooded drops on the outside and the odd gravel patch where rain has washed the verge. Cut-in pull-offs let you look across ridge after ridge in the blue haze that gives the range its name; on a still October morning the view is exactly the one on the postcards. Brasstown Bald, the highest point in Georgia, is a short way off, and the Appalachian Trail wanders along the ridges nearby, so there are often walkers at the pull-offs.
It helps to know that this is also where the gold fever of the 1820s began. Dahlonega, down the hill to the south-west, saw the first major gold rush in the United States, in 1828, before California was anyone's idea. The Cherokee, whose land this was, were pushed out in the following decade on the Trail of Tears, and the name of the nearby town comes from a Cherokee word for yellow. The Cherokee name for the whole area lingers on in rivers and gaps.
Nothing is sold at the gap itself, and the nearest towns are small, so plan your tank before you start. Dahlonega is the nearest place of any size, twenty-seven kilometres off, with a square full of cafes, shops and the old courthouse that is now a gold museum; Cleveland and Blairsville are the other places to try. Autumn weekends bring a procession of cars, bikes and tour buses, so go on a weekday if you can, and aim for the early morning, when the cold air lies in the hollows and the sun hits the ridges first. Frost can linger on shaded bends well into spring.