[2][5] Annually, the area receives at least 72 inches of rainfall and is entirely within the boundaries of the Chattahoochee National Forest.

About one-third of the land falls within the Southern Nantahala Wilderness and about one-fifth is privately owned.

The Tallulah River Road follows an old railroad bed before ending in the Southern Nantahala Wilderness[6] and provides the only access to Tate City, North Carolina.

Heavily wooded today, the upper Tallulah River Basin was stripped nearly bare by clear-cut logging in the 1930s before the Chattahoochee National Forest was established.

Some scholars later theorized that tallulah meant “terrible” in Cherokee, or was possibly derived from a number of other words.

[7] Based on archeological studies, the Cherokee appear to have settled some of their homeland by the mid to late-16th century; for instance, they had built a townhouse by the late sixteenth century at the Coweeta Creek site on the upper Little Tennessee River in present-day North Carolina.

[8] The Overhill Cherokee also used the term, and were known to have a town called Tallulah, located on the portion of the Little Tennessee that flowed on the west side of the Appalachian Mountains.