Pickering Creek

A small Chester County trout creek inside the Philadelphia suburbs.

Pickering Creek runs through Chester County and joins the Schuylkill near Phoenixville. It is small, mostly wadeable, and surrounded by some of the most densely populated counties in the state — yet it sustains a stocked trout fishery with documented holdover and pockets of wild reproduction in the cooler upper reaches.

Much of the lower-middle creek runs through Open Land Conservancy of Chester County preserves, which is why it is still a trout stream at all. It is a working example of how local land trusts keep small fisheries alive in suburban watersheds.