I have received several requests for information on the hackle / throat method on Carrie Stevens Rangeley Style streamer patterns that I have been using for over two years. While I have adapted my application of the throat fibers using a bobbin, compared to Mrs. Stevens tying “in-hand” this method and placement of the throat is basically the same method created by Carrie Stevens and gives the flies the style, appearance, and correct method of dressing her unique Rangeley Style streamers, if one desires to be historically correct in tying Carrie Stevens streamers with the accuracy of her original designs. Photographic instructions of this process are in the Carrie Stevens book by Graydon and Leslie Hilyard.
Those of us who tie streamers, and that’s probably most fly tiers unless one is a dry fly purist – I know at least one of those, and he casts only to rising trout, have heard the phrase Rangeley Style streamers. Just what does that mean? I believe Carrie Stevens of Upper Dam, Maine, with her unique, self-taught method of tying streamers, is the originator of this style, and she alone is to be credited with creating the Rangeley style streamer. I have recently come under the conviction that to tie Rangeley style streamers means to tie streamers employing Carrie Stevens’s methods. I’m not referring to merely tying her patterns and cementing the wings, which I began doing a year-and-a-half ago. Learning more about her material placement this summer was for me, the last part of the journey toward my ultimate arrival at fully utilizing her methods of material placement…
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