Pine Creek Fishing Guides and Conditions, Pennsylvania

About the Pine Creek

Pine Creek runs south through the Pine Creek Gorge, the fifty-mile canyon that Pennsylvania markets as its Grand Canyon, and it is the state’s best-known float stream. From Ansonia down through Blackwell, Cedar Run, Slate Run and Waterville, the creek runs between forested walls with the Pine Creek Rail Trail on one bank and almost no road access on the other, which makes a canoe or raft the natural way to fish it.

Spring is trout season. The creek is stocked in the accessible reaches, holds wild browns and rainbows in the cold tributaries and canyon runs, and the tributaries themselves, Slate Run, Cedar Run and their feeders, are wild brook and brown trout streams good enough to be destinations on their own. The Slate Run area has long been a fly fishing center with a well-known shop and a tradition of catch-and-release water.

By midsummer the main stem warms and the fishing turns to smallmouth bass and rock bass, which is a genuinely good warm-water float and much less crowded than the spring trout season. Water level dictates everything: Pine Creek is a spring-float creek that often gets too low to run by July, and the Cedar Run gauge is what tells you. A few hundred cfs floats comfortably; under about a hundred and fifty you will be dragging; big spring flows move fast through the canyon and demand real paddling skill.

Wellsboro is the base town, with Blackwell, Cedar Run, Slate Run and Waterville as small river stops with lodging, liveries and shuttles.

Access

Ansonia: top of the canyon float at the Highway 6 crossing.
Darling Run: the main canyon put-in and rail trail access.
Tiadaghton and Blackwell: mid-canyon accesses with camping.
Cedar Run: village access at the gauge, tributary trout water.
Slate Run: access at the Slate Run confluence, a fly fishing center.
Waterville and Jersey Shore: lower creek accesses toward the West Branch Susquehanna.
The Pine Creek Rail Trail follows the creek and reaches most of the canyon on foot or by bike.

Seasons

March through May: stocked and wild trout, the reliable float window, highest water.
June: transitional; trout in the cold water, smallmouth appearing, levels dropping.
July and August: smallmouth season on the main stem, often too low to float; tributaries hold trout.
September through November: fall rains restore floating levels, good smallmouth and wild trout in the tributaries.