To get to Buffalo Creek, head west from Lexington on 251.
There are two places to fish in Buffalo Creek. The first is down where Buffalo Creek hits Route 251and Colliers Creek. The second is a bit upstream on Colliers Creek off 612. Since we wanted to press on to other water later in the day, we elected to skip the first spot and head to the area indicated on the map on the right.
We parked at the designated spots (they are marked with a VDGIF sign) and started walking on the southern red track. This turned out to be a waste of time as there was no real good trail to get down near the creek without walking all over the landowner’s property. In addition, the water was flat and shallow – not very productive looking. We cut back across to 612 at the farmhouse right above the “o” on Buffalo. We spotted the farmer and chatted with him for a bit – he told us the best access is at the spot on the map marked as “Start Fish”. This is also the northernmost point you can fish at since the creek downstream from here is all private property and not covered by the VDGIF agreement.
We started as indicated and immediately had good luck! Nice fish – popped him back in the water immediately – the requirement here is that fish be over 16 inches to keep. We slowly worked our up the creek – pretty good action – but nothing worth keeping until we got up to the bend in the creek marked on the map (“monster caught here”). Chris laid into a really nice fish as shown below – if we were not practicing catch and release, he would have been a keeper.
We had a bit of excitement – When fishing back towards there we cut across to chat with the farmer, Chris heard some loud ‘huffing’ noises followed by brush rattling – clearly a big creature was near. He assumed it was a bear (marked on the map), and we exited the stream at that point in deference to “fish another day”.
Harry Slone confirms that this is a tough river to catch fish on – he covers it in his book Virginia Trout Streams
First cast, first fish – a quick one handed photo – don’t want to hurt these babies
Looking upstream at the entry point
Snapped this shot as this guy was getting put back in the water – total time out of water was around 20 seconds – definitely did not want to harm this guy.
Every dot in this picture is a fingerling. This creek has thousands of fish – but few trophies that fell to our Panther-Martins
Unless stated otherwise, this article was authored by Steve Moore