Morganton Point sits on a small peninsula that pushes out into the north arm of Lake Blue Ridge, about two miles southwest of the town of Morganton on Lake Drive. The Forest Service runs it as a developed recreation area inside the Blue Ridge Ranger District of the Chattahoochee National Forest, and the layout is simple: a gravel and sand swim beach on the sheltered north side of the point, a paved boat ramp, a picnic area under the pines, and a campground of roughly forty sites spread along the shoreline loop. Almost the entire far shore you look at from the beach is national forest, which is the reason the view has no houses in it.

The water here is unusually clear for a southern reservoir. Lake Blue Ridge is fed by the Toccoa River coming down out of the high country near Suches, and the lake sits at about 1,690 feet, deep and cold enough at the bottom that the surface rarely goes murky. Swimming is unsupervised, with no lifeguards and no marked lane lines, and the bottom drops away fairly quickly a few yards out from the beach, so it is not a wade-forever shallow. By late July the top few feet warm into the low 80s. Morning is the best time to swim if you want flat water, because the ski boats and pontoons come out of the Morganton and Lake Blue Ridge Marina ramps by mid-morning and the lake gets choppy.

The dam at the south end of the lake was finished in 1930 by the Toccoa Electric Power Company and taken over by TVA in 1939. It is a concrete gravity structure about 167 feet high, and it backs the Toccoa up into roughly 3,290 acres of water with 65 miles of shoreline. TVA draws the lake down in fall and winter for flood storage, which pulls the waterline well back from the beach between November and March. The reservoir usually refills to summer pool by Memorial Day.

The campground season generally runs from late April into October and sites are booked through recreation.gov. There is a day-use parking fee at the beach and a nightly fee for camping, both collected by the concessionaire that operates the site for the Forest Service. Facilities are basic but maintained: vault and flush toilets, drinking water, grills and tables, and a small swim beach bathhouse. A paddleboard and kayak rental operates out of the day-use area in summer.

Paddling is the quieter way to use this lake. From the ramp you can follow the shoreline north and east into a series of forested coves that the wakeboard traffic mostly ignores, and the Toccoa River arm at the far end is shallow and slow. On land, the town of Blue Ridge is eight miles southwest with the scenic railway depot and a walkable main street, and the Benton MacKaye and Appalachian trails cross the Toccoa on the swinging bridge north of the lake.