Big Canoe Neighborhoods & the Seven Mountains | Local Guide
Big Canoe covers roughly 8,000 acres in the North Georgia mountains, which makes "where in Big Canoe?" a bigger question than it sounds. This page is the map to that question — the named neighborhoods inside the gate, and the guides that explain what actually differs between them.
The seven mountains
Before the neighborhoods, it helps to know the bones of the place. Big Canoe sits across seven mountains:
Sanderlin Mountain
Wet Mountain
Toland Mountain
Disharoon Mountain
McElroy Mountain
Little McElroy Mountain— known today as Audubon Ridge
Cox Mountain
Those names turn up everywhere once you notice them. Cox Mountain lends its name to two neighborhoods, Cox Mountain and Hillside at Cox Mountain. Disharoon runs through the whole community — a mountain, a ridge, a lake and a creek all carry it. And Audubon Ridge, which reads like a neighborhood name, is Little McElroy Mountain.
This matters more than trivia. Elevation and which face of which mountain a home sits on drive almost everything a buyer notices day to day: what you can see, how much sun the house gets, how steep the driveway is, how long frost lingers, and how long it takes you to reach the gate.
The named neighborhoods of Big Canoe
Big Canoe is one gated community with one property owners' association and one set of covenants. Within that, homes sit in named residential neighborhoods spread across the property:
Audubon Ridge
Blackwell Creek
Buckskull
Buckskull Ridge
Chestnut Knoll
Chestnut Rise
Choctaw Village
Cox Mountain
Disharoon Ridge
Eagles Landing
Equestrian Neighborhood
High Gap
Hillside at Cox Mountain
Lake Watch
Laurel Ridge
Sconti Ridge
The Bluffs
Treetop
Twins Creek
Waterford
Wedgewood
Wildcat
Blackwell Creek and the Equestrian Neighborhood sit close to the main gate. Others are well up the mountain, and the drive from your door to that gate varies more than most buyers expect.
Two names that are not residential neighborhoods
You will also come across Golf Club Villas and Petit Crest Villas. Both carry a Big Canoe address, and buyers searching online often assume they are simply more neighborhoods. They are not.
Both are vacation-ownership properties. Each has a timeshare component and each offers vacation rentals, which makes buying into one a different kind of transaction from buying a home in any of the neighborhoods listed above — different ownership structure, different market, different rules.
Neither is a bad thing to look at, and a rental at either is a sensible way to spend a few days inside the gate before you commit to anything. They are simply not what someone shopping for a Big Canoe home is usually looking for, and it is better to know that before you fall for a listing photo. If you are not sure which you are looking at, call me and I will tell you in a minute.
Amenities are a separate decision from the house
This is the one out-of-area buyers get wrong most often. Buying in Big Canoe makes you eligible for the amenities. It does not include them.
Golf, wellness, aquatics, racquet, bocce and fishing each carry their own membership with its own dues, charged on top of your POA assessment. If you would rather not join, you can still use most of them by paying a property-owner rate per visit. Some memberships are billed monthly and some annually, there is a reduced rate on at least one of them for owners whose primary residence is outside Georgia, and memberships generally carry a minimum term and renew automatically unless you cancel in writing.
Dues and daily rates change, so I will not quote numbers that might be out of date by the time you read this.Call the Membership Director at 706-268-1092 for current figures and terms. You can also browse the Big Canoe amenity guide to see what each one includes.
One thing does not vary: the fees are flat.POA dues and amenity rates are the same for every home in Big Canoe. A larger or more expensive house does not carry a larger assessment, and a golf membership costs the same whether you live four minutes from the gate or at the top of a mountain.
What varies is which memberships you decide to carry. Two households in near-identical houses can run very different monthly costs for that reason alone, and none of it shows up in a listing price. Worth working out before you buy rather than after.
Property taxes are the exception that proves the point. Thosedodiffer from one home to the next, because Big Canoe straddles two counties — which is the subject of guide #3 below.
What matters more than the name
Here is the part that surprises people. Because every home shares the same POA and the same covenants — and because amenity membership is a choice that has nothing to do with where your house sits — the neighborhood name tells you less about daily life here than it would in a typical subdivision.
What tells you more is terrain and position. Whether a home sits on a ridge or down in a creek bottom. Whether it is four minutes from the gate or twenty. Which county line it falls on. What you can see out the back. Those differences cut across neighborhood boundaries, and they are what the guides below are organized around.
Start with the question you are actually asking
Where does the house sit on the land?
This is the first real fork, and the two directions are near-opposites. Both are good choices. They suit different people.
#4: Long-Range View Homes— What separates a true long-range view from a filtered one, why a home that dazzles in November can feel like a green wall in June, and what ridge lots ask of you in return: steep driveways, wind, and a price premium that is real.
#6: Creekside and Wooded Homes— The counterpart. Disharoon Creek, privacy inside the canopy, and the honest maintenance picture that comes with shade: moss on roofs, decks that stay damp, humid crawl spaces, and heavy gutters every fall.
What do you want out your door?
#1: Lake Living— Lake Petit, Lake Sconti and Lake Disharoon are three different experiences, not one amenity. What living near each is actually like.
#2: Golf Course Homes— The Creek, Choctaw and Cherokee nines, which lot types sit where, and the trade-offs that come with a fairway behind the house.
The practical decisions nobody tells you about
These two are the ones buyers discover late, usually after they have fallen for a house. Read them early instead.
#3: Dawson vs. Pickens, the County Line— Big Canoe straddles two counties. That affects property taxes, senior school-tax exemptions, and which services you call. Two similar homes a quarter mile apart can carry noticeably different annual costs.
#5: Near the Gate vs. Deep Inside— Across 8,000 acres, the drive from your door to the gate ranges from a few minutes to the better part of half an hour. What that means for groceries, guests, contractors and winter weather.
If you read only one first:start with #3 if you are comparing specific homes on price, because the county line changes the math in a way the listing price does not show. Start with #4 or #6 if you are still deciding what kind of place you want to wake up in.
How most buyers actually narrow it down
In practice the sequence tends to go like this. People arrive certain they want a view. Then they spend a weekend here, notice how quiet the wooded lots are, and reconsider. Or the reverse — they think they want seclusion and realize they would rather see the ridge lines every morning.
Then the practical filters tighten things up: how far they are willing to drive to the gate, which county they would rather pay taxes in, and whether they want water or a fairway out the back. The neighborhood name tends to be the last thing that settles, not the first.
There is no wrong answer in any of this. There is only the one that fits how you will actually live here, which is usually clearer after a visit than before one.
What the numbers say
These guides cover what each part of Big Canoe is like to live in. For what homes are actually selling for — by price band, with days on market and the gap between asking and closing — see the Big Canoe market report. It is updated every quarter from FMLS data, with the method shown.
Talk it through with someone who lives here
I am an Associate Broker with RE/MAX Five Star, I live and work inside Big Canoe, and I walk these lots in every season. If you are weighing two neighborhoods against each other, or you want an honest read on a specific home, I am glad to help. No pressure and no obligation.
Call or text me at 706-299-9515, or [email protected].
