Cecil Heacox’s Charmed Circle of the Catskills articles

Last weekend I read Ed Ostapczuk’s Ramblings of a Charmed Circle Flyfisher . Recommended!

In it, Ed writes:

In 1969, I read a two-part article written by Cecil E. Heacox that appeared in the March and April issues of Outdoor Life titled “Charmed Circle of The Catskills.” That poetic, yet simple, set of articles about the Catskills had a profound effect upon my life. Heacox wrote, “I call this region charmed because its fine fishing in wild, forested settings has survived even though it is within a day’s drive of one-sixth of the population of the United States and Canada.” He added, “The story of the Charmed Circle is touched with a mystical quality, trademark of the Catskills since the days of Rip Van Winkle.” In that two-part series, Heacox wrote about the many facets of trout fishing in the following Catskill streams: Rondout, Esopus, Schoharie, Beaverkill, Willowemoc, Neversink, and the Delaware. He skillfully took a neophyte like me on an enchanted piscatorial journey—one that I never forgot nor ventured too far from all these years later. Heacox pronounced the aforementioned rivers “topdrawer streams” because they were the “birthplace of dry-fly fishing in America, bailiwick of talented fly-tyers, and proving grounds for custom-rod makers” and “have lured fishermen from all corners of the world to the Charmed Circle for more than half a century.”

Cecil Heacox was no ordinary flyfisher who just picked up a pen and began writing, mind you. No, he rose professionally through the ranks of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) from a junior aquatic biologist in the Catskills to regional fisheries manager to DEC’s deputy commissioner. Years after he retired, I had the very good fortune to meet him once—a true gentleman in every sense of the word.
He autographed my copy of his 1974 book, The Compleat Brown Trout, and I thoroughly thanked him for his 1969 Outdoor Life articles. To this day I still have, and treasure, both copies of the original magazine articles.

Wow! I’d seen these articles referenced before and the phrase “Charmed Circle” is now ubiquitous, but I hadn’t read them. I decided I needed to look them up and educate myself.

Two hours of searching online later, I simply couldn’t find them, and I’m no slouch when it comes to tracking things down online. I looked everywhere I could think of: Library collections, Google Books, Outdoor Life’s website archives, the Internet Archive, etc. I found the scanned Outdoor Life 1898-1961 collection, but sadly that stopped eight years too soon. I’m pretty sure these articles weren’t available online. Dozens of references, but no original text.

I was in the Charmed Circle that weekend, so I drove over to the Jerry Bartlett collection at the Phoenicia Library, figuring they’d have a copy. No dice. Lots of great works and I left with a long to-read list, but not the Cecil Heacox articles.

I tried fruitlessly a few more times over the next couple days. Finally, I struck gold. Someone was selling all twelve 1969 issues of Outdoor Life magazine in an eBay auction. I snapped them up.

Long story short, I scanned both articles and put them up on the Internet Archive so you can read these classics, too.

Here they are:

Enjoy!

Update, 2026-04-17: The original copies I scanned now live at the Jerry Bartlett Angling Collection at the Phoenicia Library for others to enjoy. Thanks to Ed for facilitating that donation!

I noticed that the Outdoor Life Magazine website republished Cecil Heacox’s March 1969 article today. I’m glad to see that! I’d like to think my tracking it down and sharing it in the fly fishing community prompted them to republish it online themselves. I may never know.