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44 . Little Juniata River

Location: Central Pennsylvania, about a 1-hour ride from Harrisburg; a 2½-hour ride from Pittsburgh; and a 3-hour ride from Philadelphia. Full-service airports are available in all three cities.

Though located in the heart of central Pennsylvania’s trout country, and in the midst of such famous fisheries as Cedar Run, Fishing Creek, Penns Creek, Pine Creek, Slate Run, Spring Creek, and Spruce Creek, the Little Juniata has no real fly-fishing heritage. That is because prior to 1970, the “J,” as it is referred to locally, was little more than an open sewer. Upstream towns—including Altoona, a city of

50,000—dumped raw sewage and industrial waste directly into the river. A large paper mill in Tyrone added color and foam to the mix. The Clean Water Act of 1972 brought about significant changes to the way we treated our rivers—including the Little Juniata. Within a few years, three modern wastewater treatment plants were built on the river, and the pulp mill was closed.

Then Hurricane Agnes flushed the watershed with an epic flood in 1972. When the floodwaters receded, the Little Juniata flowed clear and cold for the first time in over a hundred years. Wild brown trout living in the unpolluted tributaries, including Tipton Run and Spruce Creek, rapidly populated the once-barren Little Juniata from Tyrone to Barree. The brown trout from Spruce Creek are remnants from early stockings of fish obtained from Germany in the 1890s. Trout numbers grew fast in this big, newly hospitable river.

The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission stocked the Little Juniata with hatchery trout fingerlings for all but a few years between 1975 and 2010, under the guise of supplemental stocking. At the request of the Little Juniata River Association, the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission agreed to fin-clip the fingerlings stocked into the river for a period of 2 years. The goal was to conduct extensive electroshocking surveys after the fact to evaluate