Feather Craft — In Memoriam

There Has to Be
a Better Way

Remembering John Simms: guide, inventor, and the man who redrew the boundaries of what a day on the water could be.

The River Teaches

Before he built a company, John Simms built an understanding. It came from standing in cold water for hours: rivers in New York, rivers in Wyoming, rivers that tested the limits of everything a person wore, carried, and believed. As a young boy working the trout streams of the Allegheny, and later as a guide in the shadow of the Tetons, he developed the particular kind of knowledge that no classroom produces. The knowledge of a body that has been cold, soaked, gravel-filled, and tired, and kept going anyway. It was not knowledge he wrote down. It was knowledge he eventually made into products that changed how the world fishes.

John Simms understood rivers the way trout do: from the inside. That intimacy informed everything. When he looked at a piece of gear, he wasn't evaluating it as a businessman or an engineer. He was evaluating it as a person who would stand in fifty-two-degree water until the light went off the far bank, and he wanted to know: will this hold?

Most of the time, the answer in those early years was no. Waders leaked. Gravel poured in through poorly designed boots. Cold ended mornings that should have lasted until midday. These weren't abstract product failures. For guides whose seasons depended on time on the water, they were the difference between a livelihood and a struggle. John saw this clearly, because he lived it clearly. He did not accept the limitations as the price of doing business. He considered them a problem worth solving. 

First, the Mountain

What shaped John Simms as a product thinker was not just fly fishing but the full sweep of the western outdoors he moved into after his service in the Navy. Jackson Hole in the 1960s and 70s was a proving ground for independent thinkers: people who built things because the things they needed didn't exist yet. John patrolled avalanche terrain and worked ski rescue, and out of that experience came Life-Link, a company whose backcountry rescue equipment set new standards for winter safety. He was saving lives in the mountains while simultaneously working the rivers below.

The thread between those worlds was material. Neoprene, which had proved itself in cold-weather ski gear, caught his attention. He began experimenting. Gravel guards came first: a maddening small problem that most anglers simply endured and John simply fixed. The success of that solution opened a door. If neoprene could solve gravel, what else could it do? What else was being endured on the water that didn't have to be?

In 1980, Simms Fishing Products was born in Jackson, Wyoming: born from that question, and from a lifetime of standing in rivers and refusing to be comfortable with unnecessary discomfort. We have stocked his products almost from the beginning, and we have watched, season after season, what they do for the people who trust them.

What Extended Seasons Mean

The early neoprene waders Simms introduced were not a modest improvement over what existed. They were a different category of experience. Guides who had called off mornings early because of the cold could stay. Anglers who had never fished deep into fall could fish deep into fall. The water that had driven people to the bank now simply became the water: managed, navigated, something a person moved through with confidence instead of fighting to survive.

This is worth sitting with. An extended season is not simply more days. For a guide, it is income. For a shop owner, it is inventory moving in months that once went quiet. For an outfitter, it is bookings on the calendar where only blank space lived before. We saw it in our own shop: the customers who came back in October, then November, because they finally had gear that gave them a reason to. John Simms did not set out to change the economics of fly fishing. He set out to solve a problem in front of him. But the ripple went far.

The industry around him responded. Competitors raised their standards. Manufacturers invested in research they had not considered necessary. Consumers began expecting performance where they had once accepted failure. The whole category moved: not because of a market trend, but because one man in Wyoming built something better and the market had no choice but to catch up.

Craft as Character

People who knew John Simms describe him as a visionary. The word is accurate, but it risks making him sound removed from the work: some figure gazing at horizons while others built the product. The truth was the opposite. He was as comfortable with his hands as with his ideas, and his ideas were always grounded in the tactile reality of gear that had to perform in the field, under load, in cold weather, far from any repair shop. He was not theorizing about improvement. He was pursuing it.

That same quality carried into his later life as a sculptor and artist. Whether he was designing avalanche gear, wading boots, or large-scale bronze work, he brought the same discipline: observe the problem closely, think from first principles, create something that serves a genuine purpose and does so beautifully. He did not separate craftsmanship from function. He understood them as expressions of the same thing. It is a standard we try to hold ourselves to in what we choose to carry and recommend.

What He Left Behind

John Simms' legacy is not difficult to locate. It is on the water, in the early hours, in the drift boats and the wading staffs and the breathable jackets moving through cold current. It is in the fly shop that stayed open through November because enough customers were still fishing. It is in the guide who built a life in the outdoors and never had to choose between the work and the water. It is in the angler who waded deeper than they thought they could, because the gear gave them confidence the water alone would not have provided.

We have been in the fly fishing business since 1955. In that time we have watched the sport change in ways that are easy to romanticize and harder to truly understand. What John did was one of those genuine shifts: he made it possible for more people to spend more time doing something that mattered to them. He helped countless others build a life around the water. In a field where authenticity is everything and the river does not forgive shortcuts, John Simms was the real thing.

The rivers he loved are still running. The seasons he extended are still being fished. The products that carry his name are still, every morning, helping people step into cold water with a little more confidence than they might have had otherwise.

That is a life well spent on the water, and well spent for everyone who followed him in. We are grateful to have carried his work, and to have known what it stood for.