If you ever find yourself driving up the stunning Beaverkill Valley, the historic heart of fly fishing in the Catskills, you’ll pass a seemingly endless array of jaw-dropping homes, set amongst trees and meadows, on hillsides with views across mountains, or on the banks of the winding Beaverkill River. Over the years, this unassuming valley in Upstate New York has been the home of legendary fly fishermen such as Theodore Gordon, Lee Wulff, and his surviving wife Joan, who at the age of 91 still fishes these parts nearly every day.
The houses that you pass are beautiful, well kept, austere, quiet to the point of seeming unused. And some are the famous old fly fishing clubs of the Beaverkill Valley—Balsam Lake Club (est. 1883), The Fly Fishers Club of Brooklyn (est. 1895), The Beaverkill Trout Club (est. 1910). These clubs have served a significant purpose throughout their history of protecting this environmentally vibrant valley, but the knock-on effect was to privatize the river to the point where it has become almost entirely inaccessible to the public in it’s upper reaches. On top of this, the clubs largely maintain a cool indifference to outsiders; a closed group of insiders with the keys to river.