Renowned Colorado Fly Tier A.K. Best Passes Away at 92

Archie “A.K.” Best, the renowned Colorado fly tier and longtime streamside associate of the late John Gierach, passed away on August 20 according to multiple reports, at the age of 92.

A native of Iowa, Best was a professional fly tier and signature tier for Umpqua Feather Merchants, a former fly shop owner, a nationally known seminar lecturer, and a longtime Boulder resident, where he resided with his late wife Janet (Jan) for more than 40 years. When his wife passed away in 2023, the couple had been married for 67 years.

Born in Iowa in 1933, Best grew up on a Midwestern farm, but he lived in Boulder for many years after moving to Colorado in 1980. While fly tying and writing magazine stories about the craft dominated the later decades of his life—he wrote for most fly-fishing publications out there, including Fly Fisherman magazine—he was also a prolific book author too, eventually penning a total of nine books.

So extensive were his writings about fly fishing and fly tying that Montana State University now houses the A.K. Best Collection, 1983-2015. That collection consists “…of letters, printed emails, drafts of various books, published articles, flies, and awards.” There’s also photographs, memorabilia, flies, and published magazine articles among other things.

According to the university, Best formerly owned Front Range Anglers fly shop. But it’s his flies, and his writing, that he is best known for as he became a quiet-spoken giant in the industry. 

He isn’t enshrined in the Catskill Fly Fishing Center & Museum's Fly Fishing Hall of Fame—yet, that is—nor may his obituary be carried by the New York Times as Gierach’s was last fall, but it should be because Best quietly assembled his own Hall of Fame career. After getting his magazine writing start in Mid Atlantic Fly Fishing Guide, and with the encouragement of Gierach, whom he met at the fly shop in Boulder, Best was soon on his way towards the building of that career in the 1970s and 1980s, one fly and one manuscript at a time.

But for all of his Colorado fly-fishing fame, that wasn't where he got his start, nor where he met his wife Jan. Raised in a Midwestern musical family, Best studied music education at Iowa's Drake University in the 1950s. When he sought help with a project from a concert-going flutist and pianist on the Drake campus, the couple began to date eventually leading to his proposal to Jan at a Christmas party.

A saxophonist, Best's Wikipedia biography notes that marriage and graduation would bring a move to the shores of Lake Huron, where Best would spend some 17 years working in the music department of Alpena County, Michigan. 

While residing in northeastern Michigan, he made a life altering discovery according to writer Seth Boster, who penned a story about Best last year in both the Colorado Springs Gazette and Denver Gazette newspapers.

“That’s where I discovered brook trout, which changed my life,” he told Boster. And since you needed trout flies to catch trout, something that was difficult to do given the family he was supporting on a music education salary, he did the next best thing.

“I couldn’t afford to buy them,” he noted, “so I learned how to tie them.”

He did just that, disappearing into his basement tying room for hours at a time, often with jazz or classical music playing. With an eye to detail and a willingness to break traditional norms, Best’s patterns were soon in great demand. So much so that Boulder newspaper writer Ed Engle would say that Best’s flies were the best he had ever seen. Best would keep at it for decades, stopping only as advancing age and the sorrow from losing Jan a couple of years ago forced him away from the fly-tying vise for good.

But as Best perfected the fly-tying craft earlier in his life, he would produce many of the 72,000 flies sold annually by the Boulder fly shop. He would go on to become a commercial fly tier for Orvis, selling and developing numerous patterns for the Manchester, Vermont retail and fly-fishing giant. 

Best would also tie thousands of flies for the Manhattan, New York fly shop Urban Angler, with Best serving as the main dry-fly tier for the shop. While he tied a little bit of everything from his basement in Boulder, Best was likely best known for his trout dry fly patterns and was dubbed "Dry Fly Guru" by Gierach.

While Gierach—who died of a heart attack last fall and reportedly drew a passionate eulogy from Best at a memorial service this spring—often denied that he had much to do with Best’s fame, the pair were inseparable in much of Gierach’s early writing.

Still, the sport’s original “trout bum” opined that it was Best and his incredible flies that did all of the heavy lifting.

“A couple of people credited me with making him famous, and I don’t think I did,” Gierach is quoted in Boster’s story from April 2024. “I think he made himself famous, because his flies were really exceptional, and he had some ideas about flies that weren’t exactly common wisdom.”

While Gierach’s belief about his friend is likely true, it’s in the writings of the Trout Bum that I first learned of Best and his amazing abilities at a vise with hair, feathers, and thread. In fact, over the years, as I collected Gierach’s, I felt like I got to know both the essay writer and his tying pal as they fished on streams across the American West.

One Gierach story in his book Dances With Trout has always resonated with me, titled “A Few Days Before Christmas.” It’s a poignant story that deals with the starkness of wintertime fishing and Best traveling back to the family farm to bury his father and sell his estate. Having lost my own father a few years ago, I feel many of the same things that Gierach described in this tale about the therapeutic value of fly fishing after a sobering loss, including the idea that sometimes, we go for the fishing itself and not for what we might catch.

“All the signs pointed to poor fishing or, as A.K. would say, in the tone of a schoolteacher correcting your grammar, ‘poor catching,’ since the fishing itself is always good,” wrote Gierach. “Now that I think about it, I guess that was the whole point.”

Indeed it is, especially with a great dry-fly pattern plucked from an A.K. Best-filled fly box, even as the chilly wind blows down a Colorado river canyon, and a few snowflakes dart through the air, just a few days before the Yuletide. Maybe there will be a good rainbow or two, and maybe there will not be, but as long as you’re gently laying a small BWO dry fly pattern on the water with a good friend, everything is right with the world, if only for a few hours.

Best is preceded in death by his wife Jan and is survived by three adult daughters, seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

His huge impact will last for a long time to come. We’re forever in your debt, rest in peace sir.

Editor’s Note: As of this writing, there is no word on funeral services. 

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