All forms of fishing have a certain addictive quality, but fly fishing in particular takes
you to the most beautiful places.
And it has a certain grace about it.
This is a really good wet fly run right here.
I forgot about this grouple.
The most rewarding experience is when the trout are rising around you and there are
several insects available to them and you're not really sure what they're taking, the epitome
of fly fishing is being able to fool that finicky fish that's been refusing yours and
other people's flies.
In the earlier days there were tanneries on the river.
By late 1890s we had an active paper mill.
It was literally an open sewer.
Our challenge in this urban area is to get the stream as clean as we can even though it's
surrounded by such things as salvage yards.
We've also done a lot of stream bank repair work up in the headwaters trying to eliminate
sediment from stream bank erosion.
That was an eight foot hike erosion bank.
We have restored it with riprap and stone and with plantings that were there.
And we did that on both sides of the stream here for 300 feet in both directions.
A Little Juniata River Association is a totally volunteer group.
We have no full time employees and we have now built the membership over the past ten
years from just a few dozen to over 200.
We put over a thousand trees and shrubs in this area to stop the erosion that was occurring
at one time.
We've done a lot of silky dogwoods and sycamore words and gray dogwood.
Every bend here was eroding really badly.
I saw this bank right here lose three feet of soil in one storm before we did our work.
We were going to lose that whole point.
Those trees were getting undermined so we stoned that.
There's wood structure under the stones so there's about five feet of fish habitat back
underneath of that cribbing.
This was our number one site as far as contributing to the erosion to the sediment in the river,
the upper river.
As far as all that sediment ends up eventually in a Chesapeake Bay, there's a boy and a young
man and I prowled the banks of the Chesapeake.
I have some affinity for the bay.
Every spring we have a clean up that involves 20 miles of river bank and over 200 people.
And we've also instituted program with fishing boat commission for public fishing easements
on the river.
We have more than five miles of permanently public fishing water as a result of the efforts
of the Little Junior River Association.
It's been very important because we want to make sure this resource stays open for our
children and grandchildren.
We're not done.
We won't be done until all 32 miles of river are permanently, publicly excessive.
