Pennsylvania's most famous wild-trout river and the home of the Green Drake circus — for a week or two at the turn of May into June, Ephemera guttulata hatches in numbers that draw anglers from across the country, and the big browns lose their heads over the duns and the Coffin Fly spinner fall. The rest of the year it's a superb, big, walk-in limestoner freestone with sulphurs, slate drakes and serious streamer water.
Penns Creek rises from the great limestone spring at Penns Cave in central Pennsylvania and runs down through a wooded valley as the state's most famous wild-trout river — limestone-fertile up top, freestone-wild as it tumbles into its forested lower gorge below Coburn. It is best known for one thing: the Green Drake, the giant mayfly whose hatch and spinner fall each late May draws fishermen from half the country and turns the river, for a week or two, into a circus of big rising browns and frustrated anglers. The bed is limestone-and-sandstone cobble and ledge; the water is clear, the lower river boulder-strewn and remote where the rattlesnakes outnumber the road crossings. Wading is rocky freestone work, slick in the gorge. Penns is a river of two characters — fertile spring creek and wild mountain freestone — and it rewards the angler who understands which one he's standing in.
Wading: Slick boulders in the remote lower gorge
- Limestone influenced
- Partly confined
- Pool riffle
- Step pool