If folks haven't yet visited the
Letort Spring Garden Preserve created & maintained by the
Central Pennsylvania Conservancy a worthwhile organization I been a supporter of for a long time, you owe it to yourself to visit.
You can walk a trail (the old RR ROW) to all the way from Spring Garden Street to Bonnybrook Road which was off limits many moon ago. I fished many times the back way upstream to the NO TRESPASSING sign at the back of the cress farm on what we used to call the "Left Branch" of the Letort, now known as the UNT to Letort Spring Run.
That was until the big fish kill in 1981 when insecticides used in the cress farm wiped out all the fish in the UNT to the mouth and downstream on the mainstem of the Letort all the way through town.
Besides the obvious, it sucked big time because if you were a die hard like me and wanted to fish the Letort, you were pretty much relegated to fish Trego's Meadow upstream from Bonnybrook Road.
Trego's in those days was accessed via a ladder over a barbed wire fence. Once in the meadow the stream is small, the banks were severely overgrown, there was a lot of cress so you are fishing narrow channels and you can only access one side of the stream so the water is flowing right to left.
That meant for a right hander (like me); if you wanted to cast upstream you were casting left handed or back handed pretty much all the time on a stream section where you really needed to be fishing from your knees and pinpoint accuracy was critical to get good drifts. If that wasn't bad enough, it was mosquito city...
It was miserable fishing for me (even though I caught fish), so I toughed it out up there for a few years until the restoration efforts took hold and fish repopulated the Letort below the UNT.
Speaking of Ed, I once had the pleasure of butting into a conversation Ed was having about WWII (another interest of mine) with some other guys at Cold Spring Anglers.
I asked him if I bought a copy of "Fly Rod Trouting," would he inscribe to me, which he did with pleasure and he even drew a Letort Cricket next to it. I also told him I owned one of the last one piece, 5'0" glass rods he built, but I was reluctant to fish it unless he promised to build me another if I broke it.
He just smiled and laughed.