With clear, concise text, Craven provides tips and techniques from his over thirty years of tying flies for fly shops on Colorado's Front Range. This book is built on Craven's successful fly-tying classes, which start out with simple flies and work toward more complex patterns, all the while teaching techniques and introducing materials by tying popular patterns that catch fish in Eastern and Western streams. This series of lessons show how flies build on one another, enabling readers to tie a wide range of patterns simply by breaking them down into parts. Craven illustrates the progression with his meticulous directions to fingerbusters like Copper Johns, Stimulators, and Humpies.

This book, which is sure to become a standard text for basic fly tying, covers 17 flies (including recipes for popular variations), including the Brassie, Black Beauty, RS2, Hare's Ear, Pheasant Tail, Prince Nymph, Copper John, Woolly Bugger, Elk Hair Caddis, Stimulator, Adams, Rusty Spinner, Parachute Blue-Winged Olive, X Comparadun, Royal Wulff, Humpy, and Goddard Caddis.

As with the two prior editions, our aim in the book is to provide a clear picture of each stream and to aid the angler in his or her fishing efforts on that water. For the 16 streams and rivers presented in the book, we offer a description; discuss the characteristics of the trout that inhabit it and how to fish for those trout; note the tackle and equipment that are appropriate; describe insect hatches and other stream life; point to some of the problems facing the stream; and tell you how to get there. A big part of getting you there is a good map, and we have sought to create the very best maps possible. In presenting this information, one of our main goals has been to offer useful and interesting information, without getting the reader lost in too many details.

Each existing chapter has been revised and updated, including both the narrative and the maps. And you will notice two new chapters, one on the catch-and-release section of the Patuxent River tailwater below Brighton Dam and the other on the parts of Catoctin Creek that are now under delayed harvest regulations.

Although the book is oriented toward fly fishing, we aimed to make it useful to spin fishers as well. Most of the streams we describe permit both spin fishing and fly fishing. Stream descriptions, discussions of stocking policies and trout in each river, as well as the maps and driving directions will be every bit as pertinent to spin fishers as fly anglers.