News & Views
Spruce Creek Dreams
Sporting Club offers world-class trout fishing and the opportunity to save priceless natural resources.
Chris Maybury grinned as he fought another trophy rainbow trout, its flanks flashing in the late afternoon sun. Fishing Spruce Creek had been challenging, requiring several fly changes between strikes, but Maybury caught and released one trophy after another on a short stretch of stream controlled by the Spring Ridge Club in central Pennsylvania.
The owner of a Learjet 60 XL, Maybury has been traveling the world in pursuit of sport since last year when he and Lord Laidlaw of Rothiemay sold IIR, then believed to be the second largest privately owned business in Britain. Maybury races cars and a 112-foot Swan yacht, shoots on Britain’s most exclusive estates and fishes the world’s great rivers. "I’ve fished in Russia and Alaska," he says," but I’ve been looking for the very best streams in the United States so I’d be able to enjoy fishing without having an extended trip. So here I am, having the most amazing fishing, and I’ll be out for dinner tonight at home in Greenwich, Connecticut."
Maybury’s fly rod throbbed with another big rainbow, hooked on a nymph.
Releasing a bright, 25- or 26-inch rainbow, he says, “I’ve been catching fish like this all day. I would suggest that this is as good fishing as you will find anywhere in the U.S.”
Bob Burke, recently retired as COO of Boston Properties, agrees. “I’ve fished all over the world,” says Burke, who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and flies to the Spring Ridge Club several times a year. “I have a frame of reference, and I can tell you that you can catch as many fish here, and as many large fish here as, literally, anywhere in the world.” His other fishing destinations this year include the Rockies, British Columbia and New Zealand.
Some Background
Donny Beaver, a successful entrepreneur who grew up near Spruce Creek, founded the Spring Ridge Club in 2001 to preserve some of America’s greatest trout waters – only two hours by car from the nation’s capitol and minutes by air from New York City.
The club began by acquiring access to three miles on four streams. At the beginning of last summer, Spring Ridge Club controlled 14 miles on 11 streams, and Beaver is planning to acquire more access.
To ensure privacy, the club limits the number of memberships available based on the amount of water it controls. When more memberships became available in July, the fully refundable membership deposit increased to $79,500, and club officials expect it to continue rising.
Each stretch of stream, or “beat”, is limited to two anglers per day. To ensure top quality fishing, each beat is rested for at least as much time as it is fished.
Spring Ridge Club has stream keepers to patrol and maintain its properties, and, in some cases, they improve the streams for trout. A flat, slow-flowing stretch of Yellow Creek, for example, used to get so hot in the summer that trout – and the aquatic insects they eat – couldn’t live there. The club used natural rock and an unusual netting material made of coconut husks to narrow the stream. Spring floods covered the net with fertile soil, and native grasses and wild plants moved in. Now, the net is decomposing naturally, and trout and aquatic insects are thriving in the cooler water. Meanwhile, deer, rabbits and other terrestrial critters have moved into the new riparian habitat.
Less than two hours by car from Washington, D.C., and 15 miles from the Altoona Blair County Airport, the Yellow Creek properties are quickly becoming the most popular among club members, says membership director Mike Harpster. One stretch of Yellow Creek looks like a picture postcard of a Montana spring creek.
The club owns homes on several streams to accommodate members. Its headquarters, Orvis fly shop and clubhouse are on the historic Camp Espy Farms in the village of Spring Creek where Spruce Creek and the Little Juniata meet. It’s close to University Park Airport near State College, Pennsylvania, and is also accessible by helicopter.
A variety of accommodations are available, from single rooms decorated with fine antiques, to fishing lodges to a three-bedroom home on Yellow Creek. At the clubhouse, a continental breakfast, featuring home-baked bread and muffins, is served daily, and there is a sandwich bar for members to prepare streamside lunches.
Extreme Grounds for Trout
It is the fishing, however, that attracts new members. Burke says the fishing and the conservation ethic behind the Spring Ridge Club lured him to join last year.
Most of the streams that the club controls flow through farm land, some of it now fallow. For years, the rivers that run through the farms have, at worst, been a nuisance, flooding fields in the spring. At best, they’ve provided free water for irrigation and watering dairy cows. Neither irrigation pumps nor cows, however, are good for rivers and the wild creatures that depend on the streams.
Struggling to pay their taxes, some farmers are selling to developers, who are even more harmful to rivers than irrigation pumps and cows. For evidence of harm, says Harpster, look at the once legendary streams of southern Pennsylvania, such as the Yellow Breeches and the Letort Spring Run, where suburban sprawl infects the landscape.
Along comes Donny Beaver. His grandparents owned land here, and they lost it. Now he is driven to save the land and the streams that run through it. That’s why he bought Camp Espy Farms, a Boy Scout camp in the 1930s and ‘40s that now serves as headquarters for the Spring Ridge Club.
Two developers had been eyeing the property. One of them could have jammed 288 two-bedroom cottages on 128 acres. The Spring Ridge Club plans to offer 12 sites for cabins. Another piece of property the club controls on Tipton Run could handle 100 houses. “We’re looking at three,” says Beaver.
“We’re using a model similar to land trusts and conservancies, but we’re doing it in a for-profit way,” he says. “To date, we haven’t asked Uncle Sam for any help through tax breaks. We just say, ‘Look, we’ve been more fortunate in our lives than we could have ever imagined… We want to see this make economic sense for us, our kids and our kids’ kids'.”
Looking to the future, Beaver says, “The first phase is to conserve places within driving distance of the metro mid-Atlantic area… These are the areas most vulnerable to urban sprawl. It doesn’t take long for smart developers to say, ‘Oh, by the way, a trout stream runs through the property. Isn’t that a nice amenity to the golf course?’
“What we say is, ‘No, the stream is the asset. That is what has to be protected.’” As word of the Spring Ridge Club spreads, owners of vast tracts have been calling Beaver for help in preserving their land and streams.
“I see the next five to 10 years preserving properties within two hours of major metro areas, anywhere from Boston to Richmond, Virginia,” he says. “Beyond that, we’re going to Colorado to visit with a couple ranchers facing the same dilemma as farmers here. We think we have similar opportunities throughout the American West, Argentina, Canada and even in England. Our model of a membership-driven, long-term, committed, well-endowed group of folks is a really neat way to preserve these great places.”
FBO Info
ALTOONA BLAIR COUNTY AIRPORT
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