Spring Creek

A wild-trout factory in the middle of town.

Spring Creek runs through State College, Bellefonte, and the surrounding Centre County limestone valley. It is a Class A wild trout stream from end to end, and PFBC electrofishing surveys regularly produce some of the highest biomass-per-mile counts in the eastern U.S.

It is also a recovered river. A 1980s industrial contamination event closed the creek to harvest; the catch-and-release regulation never went away, and the wild brown trout population thrived under it. Today most of the main stem is no-harvest.