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Built on a philosophy of limited memberships solely based on water availability, Pennsylvania’s Spring Ridge Club provides world-class catch-and-release fly-fishing experiences for those lucky enough to be accepted as members.

Most fly-fishermen will never cast their feathered offerings on a private stretch of limestone creek. “Limestoners” are fed by fertile natural springs spilling from the underground aquifer at cool, year-round temperatures of 48-52 degrees and represent less than 3% of all the trout streams in the world. Vegetation thrives on the nutrients in these alkaline creeks and provides an environment where insects and crustaceans abound and trout can feast and grow healthy and strong.

These creeks have been jealously guarded by their owners for decades. Spring Ridge Club, through its relationships with private landowners and its own land holdings, has been able to build up to more than 30 miles of fly-fishing streams in three locations in Pennsylvania – The Preserves at Spruce Creek, Stillwater, and Erie, Pennsylvania.

Spring Ridge Club
P.O. Box 88
Spruce Creek, PA 16683
814-632-5827 (Member Reservations)
888-772-5820 (Sales Office)

The Spring Ridge Club

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Tight Lines

Private Air Magazine March 2007
By Michael Pearce

Time Flies

Just a few hours from landing gear up to fishing gear on from a number of East Coast cities, Spring Ridge Club provides the perfect place to slow down.

As CEO of an $11-billion megacompany, Textron’s Lewis Campbell has the schedule from hell as he rides herd on such heavyweights as Cessna and Bell Helicopter. But let him see even a sliver of an opening amid his travels to board meetings, negotiations, and product demonstrations, and he’ll quickly have the Citation X – his airborne office – headed toward a slice of heaven in the mountains of central Pennsylvania. Give him the rarity of a few days from the grind, and he’ll quickly take any private or commercial aircraft he can find to the same place.

“I can be there within about two hours from anywhere on the East Coast,” Campbell notes, “and I’m talking from wheels up to putting my [wading] boots on. It’s so handy with my schedule.”

“There” is Spring Ridge, a rapidly growing club designed to provide unparalleled trout fishing in a family-friendly atmosphere for affluent sportsmen who deeply value both.

Spring Ridge members currently have exclusive access to about 30 miles of legendary trout waters, and the club is adding several miles of great trout fishing in the Poconos barely two hours from Manhattan, plus outstanding steelhead fishing near Lake Erie. All of the club’s waters began as some of the best in eastern America, and they’ve been sculpted to become and remain world-class.

Like the management of truly great companies and airplanes, the staff of Spring Ridge Club pays attention to the most finite of details and lets them all roll together to consistently provide high-quality experiences. Stream managers monitor the water quality and natural habitat to make sure each mile of water has the perfect mix of pools, cut banks, and overhanging vegetation so trout have the incredible amounts of insect hatches that make fat, actively feeding fish.

Carefully managed angling pressure and guides who check conditions daily ensure that Campbell and the other club members will have a high rate of success in a quality setting. “Time is precious,” emphasizes Campbell. “I travel to some other places, but if I could only fish one place it would be Spring Ridge. There’s no question about that.”

There’s also no question that Spring Ridge is a perfect place for Campbell to host others. The club offers myriad piscine opportunities from can’t-miss holes where the casting’s easy and there are hundreds of small fish to more difficult stretches where both the challenges of the casting and the fish are huge.

Spring Ridge has been perfect for Campbell’s family too. A life-long avid hunter and spin-fisherman, Campbell didn’t get into fly-fishing until he was an adult and a buddy took him first to an Orvis store and then to a Michigan trout stream. “I didn’t catch a thing,” Campbell remembers, “but I absolutely fell in love with the sport.”

He wasted little time sharing that love with his three children and their spouses, and five of the six now enjoy the sport almost as much as he does. “It’s really something to look down the middle of a trout stream and see them all out there fishing and having a good time,” he notes. “That’s really something to have that kind of quality time with the family. It’s such a nice gift for all of us.”

Campbell has received many fine other kinds of gifts from his Spring Ridge Club membership. He recalls a rainy afternoon on his favorite Spruce Creek beat when he hooked, fought, and landed his best-ever fly-caught trout despite the long odds of very light line, tiny fly, and a shallow stream full of tippet-snapping snags. “I was pretty excited, but we didn’t have a camera,” he remembers. “The guide said he had one in the truck but didn’t want to get it out because it might get wet and ruined. I told him to go get it – it would be a lot easier for me to buy him another camera than for me to catch another 10-pound trout.”

Like most people who’ve worked so hard for so long, Campbell says he’s looking forward to the time in his life when he’s able to fish and enjoy his family more than work. Watching Spring Ridge Club grow quickly and spread over so many areas in a relatively short period of time, he’s eager to see what waters will be available when that time comes.

But for now he’s still largely focused on keeping a corporation with about 37,000 employees strong and growing. With his blackberry in his waders in case he needs to be reached, Campbell squeezes as much time as he can in Spring Ridge waters where he can relax and be just another American fly-fisherman.

“Trout always seem to live in beautiful places, and it’s refreshing that fly-fishing is something you can do with others, but when you’re in the water you can still be alone,” explains Campbell. “And I’ve never had a fish ask me how the company was doing!”

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Spruce Creek Dreams

Sporting Club offers world-class trout fishing and the opportunity to save priceless natural resources.

Published in STRATOS Magazine, March 2007
By Tom Meade

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.”

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So You Think You Want To Own A Trout Stream?

You've dreamed of owning a private section of prime spring creek and a fishing camp for the exclusive use of your family and friends. You could fish any time you want...in solitude.

Consider your options...There are some properties in the West with private spring creeks like Armstrong's, Nelson's, and DePuy's, but they are not currently for sale. However, a recent web search revealed a few Western properties for sale with private spring creeks. They range from Aubrey Springs Ranch in Idaho, with a cottage and 1.5 miles of private spring creeks selling for $4.2 million; Flint Creek Valley Ranch in Montana, no home, 500 acres, and two miles of creeks (1/4 mile private) for $2 million.

Here in Pennsylvania, many spring creeks are tied up in multi-generational family farms and estates or fishing clubs...they are simply not for sale and probably never will be. And, if a mile of prime spring creek does become available, it'll cost you at least a million dollars to buy it.

Count the Cost
We believe that buying your own trout stream is not a wise use of resources. Actually, for less than the annual cost of upkeep and taxes on a mile of trout stream with a fishing camp, Spring Ridge Club members enjoy exclusive and unlimited access to an ever-growing portfolio of private, blue-ribbon spring creeks.

Less Cash at the Front-End
Consider buying a $2 million trout property at 30 percent down; your out-of-pocket costs would be $600,000 immediately. Spring Ridge Club membership is just over 15 percent of that amount, and it's fully refundable.

Less Cash Every Single Year
That $2 million property will cost you over $150,000 per year to maintain and operate (debt service, maintenance, utilities, insurance, and taxes). On the other hand, the no-hassle Conservation Membership is under $10,000 in annual dues.

Easy Liquidity
If you've ever had a vacation home, you are well aware of the liquidity issues in a fluctuating real estate market. Instead, if you wish to resign from the Club, your entire membership deposit, minus a modest transfer fee, is refunded. (Special restrictions apply; please ask one of our sales guides for clarification.)

No Maintanence Headaches
Why spend half of your fishing time cutting grass, washing windows or fixing leaks in the roof or plumbing? As a member of Spring Ridge Club, you can enjoy every single minute you spend at the Club.

Fly Fishing Diversity
After a while, fishing the same stretch of trout water over and over can become monotonous. Conversely, the wide variety of the ever-expanding Spring Ridge Club waters will hold your interest for more than a lifetime of fishing.

Poacher Control
Don't laugh. It's one of the primary problems in maintaining a high-quality fishery on private properties. We know because we manage more than 30 miles of streams. From experience, we have found that some of the biggest poachers in the world can be the caretakers of fishing estates (and their family and friends). Our aggressive poacher control program strongly discourages this form of predation.

You Have All the Fun -- We Do All the Work
You never really own a gold-medal fishing property...it owns you. By becoming a member of Spring Ridge Club, you will have the peace of mind knowing that you can enjoy world-class fly-fishing without the worry.

A Family Legacy
Your modest, refundable membership deposit in Spring Ridge Club is fully transferable to your spouse, kids or grandkids. Unlike an expensive, time-consuming property that your family may not want to deal with, you can pass on your membership with total peace of mind. If you would like to know more, call our sales staff at 888-772-5820 (toll-free).

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Here is an interview between Helium Report and Spring Ridge Club's founder and CEO, Donny Beaver.

Interview with Spring Ridge Club CEO and Founder, Donny Beaver | Helium Report - Luxury 2.0 Guides and Reviews