Hi Donald,

Good point! It was described as "red and black fibres mixed" and "red and black hackles wound together", so I'm pretty sure in this case it's as above. Also, steelhead patterns are often very brightly coloured, and Knudson thought this fly put the lie to the notion that steelhead would only take a brightly coloured fly. But you you know, though, furnace would look really good on this...

Indeed, I often wonder with the older patterns, when they say red, they often mean natural red, and for bright red they would put scarlet ... but of course, not always, and sometimes red just means red.

- Jeff