PHOTO BY PIPPA DRUMMOND
You can spend an entire weekend at the DeBruce, a rustic 14-room inn that opened last spring in New York’s Catskill Mountains, without realizing it’s a fly-fisherman’s paradise. But the signs are there: Next to the Club Room restaurant and cocktail bar is a new tackle room with custom-made lockers, and the cozy conservatory is stocked with books about trout. And, in the fish camp–style great room, you’ll find a fly-tying station stocked with feathers, thread, hooks, and scissors where you can make your own Woolly Buggers, Muddler Minnows, and Royal Wulffs.
Think of the inn as a prep station for the private 600-acre wonderland just outside. The property’s centerpiece is the pristine Willowemoc Creek, a frequent topic of the writings of George La Branche, the father of American dry-fly fishing.
“We can claim as much legitimacy as anybody else as being the valley where American dry-fly-fishing started,” says hotel co-owner Sims Foster, who grew up angling in the area.
Want to feel the magic of what A River Runs Through It author Norman Maclean called “a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise”? From Memorial Day through October, guides from the family-run Dette Flies offer lessons ranging from 90 minutes to eight hours.
Fishing $75–$425, rooms from $469, thedebruce.com
