December 04, 2025
By Fly Fisherman Staff
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Bill Skilton started fly fishing at an early age with tutelage from Limestone Legends such as Charlie Fox, Vince Marinaro, and Ross Trimmer. Learn about the history of Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley and its impact on fly fishing in North America. Pennsylvania’s spring creeks such as LeTort Spring Run, Big Spring Creek, Falling Springs, and parts of the Yellow Breeches were the birthplace of terrestrial fly patterns such as beetles, ants, and the famous LeTort hopper and cricket. Skilton is a Renaissance man. He’s the president of the Pennsylvania Fly Fishing Museum, a buyer and seller of historic fly rods, art and flies, and is also an avid chicken raiser for premium hackle. If you ever thought of raising your own roosters, Skilton deep dives into the rigors of raising chickens and how to get varying results for hackle colors and sizes.
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Truncated transcript:
00:00:03.000 --> 00:00:58.290: Hi, I'm Ross Purnell, editor and publisher of Fly Fisherman magazine. Welcome to Loop to Loop. It's a show where we make deeper connections with the people behind the magazine. We're sponsored today are Patagonia. Check out their new line of Swiftcurrent Waders. There are two models, the Expedition and the Traverse. The expeditions like a heavy duty model. It's best for a wintertime fishing or anything. You're, anytime you're in really rugged conditions. I've been wearing the traverse all summer. It's a zip front with a little lighter material up top, and both of 'em are super functional and they work really well with the Stealth Switch Packs. You can hook those packs onto your wader belt or onto your wader loops. It's really cool the way they work together, so check those out.
00:00:58.290 --> 00:01:23.040: We're also sponsored by G. Loomis, American-made rods. They're manufactured in Woodland, Washington and they're fantastic. I've been using Loomis rods for going on 20 years now, and I have Asquith, NRX+ and IMX Pro rods of different lengths and weights for different applications. Check 'em out They are great casting and more importantly fishing tools.
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00:01:23.040 --> 00:02:02.730: If you enjoy this podcast, you can support us by subscribing to Fly Fisherman magazine. It's really easy. Go to flyfisherman.com. There's a subscribe button up in the top right-hand corner. You can also follow us on social media. On Instagram, we are @flyfishermanmagazine, on Facebook @flyfisherman. And hopefully you are watching this podcast in its YouTube format on our YouTube channel @flyfisherman magazine.
00:02:02.730 --> 00:02:41.850: Our guest today is Bill Skelton, who wears many hats, say, believe you are president of the Pennsylvania Fly Fishing Museum, one of the head honchos. Anyways, he is been a long time Cumberland Valley, spring creek fisherman. He is a hackle connoisseur and chicken breeder, and nobody knows the history of fly fishing or Pennsylvania fly fishing in particular like Bill Skilton lot of really meaty topics that I am very interested in.
00:02:41.850 --> 00:03:05.350: Cool. Thanks Ross for having me here. I'm, I'm excited. It's gonna be interesting. I, while we were setting up, I hesitated to ask a lot of questions because I have a lot of questions that I want to ask, but I wanna do it on camera so I didn't get started too early. So where to where to start?
00:03:05.350 --> 00:03:31.930: I think first just, you know, a lot of people download this podcast. They're not aware of how important the Cumberland Valley is in the history of fly fishing, and I think that's a pretty good place to start. Can you explain why the Cumberland Valley in Pennsylvania has an important place in fly fishing history?...
