Trevor Gong's Museum-Quality Flies

Even the tedium of tying production flies hasn’t caused Southeast Alaska’s Trevor Gong to lose his taste for the fly as art. One of his Evening Star salmon flies — a pattern first published in J.H. Hale’s 1892 book How to Tie Salmon Flies — was just acquired by the Juneau-Douglas City Museum. “‘Basically you have a palette of colors, and you just start going for it, like you’re painting,’ Gong said. ‘That’s really the part that I like. A lot of these flies have married wings. You can take a feather and cut the barbs off and pull them apart. So you can take a lot of different colors and pull them apart and put them back together just like you’re painting with color, as long as the feathers are compatible.'” In the Juneau Empire.