The Meteoric Rise and Fall of a Denver Fly Shop

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This article was originally titled "When Icarus Went Fly Fishing," from the June-July 2025 issue of Fly Fisherman. 

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[Over the course of six months author Andrew Becker conducted more than 40 interviews to find out what happened to one of Denver’s most visible and prominent fly shops. The Editor.]

For much of the last two decades, Tucker Ladd and his Trouts Fly Fishing of Denver, Colorado—a fly shop, online marketer, and angling outfitter—sat atop the angling world. Or so it appeared.

A first-time business owner at 24, Ladd turned a tiny 10-year-old store into an industry juggernaut. Brands like Simms Fishing Products and Umpqua, with whom Ladd had close relationships, helped make Trouts one of the highest-grossing fly shops anywhere.

That success elevated Ladd to be a leading voice of fly fishing. He served as board chairman of the American Fly Fishing Trade Association (AFFTA), the first retailer to hold that position. He was interviewed for an oral history about angling. CNN turned to him for advice on buying fly rods.

At Trouts, Ladd employed dozens of guides and savvy shop employees, invested in a second location, and accumulated nearly 200,000 followers across multiple social media platforms—on top of the business’s own podcast and an annual printed magazine. In doing so, Ladd made a name for himself and his business. The brand had massive reach and influence within the small sport of fly fishing.

“You walk into Trouts in Denver, and you immediately think to yourself . . . ‘This feels like a real fly shop,’” Jim Klug, founder of travel outfitter Yellow Dog Fly Fishing, told Ladd in an October 2019 conversation on his Waypoints podcast. “Your business, in my opinion, is the very definition of a specialty shop.”

When other fly shops struggled to stock enough product during the Covid pandemic—when interest in fly fishing skyrocketed—Trouts seemed to benefit. Early on in the pandemic, Ladd expanded to an even bigger location in Denver on the banks of the South Platte. There, Trouts offered everything—from an “experiential” display of how fly rods are made to beer on tap.

The Fall

And then, in October 2023, Trouts came crashing down. The Colorado Department of Revenue slapped a seizure notice on the door of the company’s 4,800-square-foot building—essentially shuttering the business—for failure to pay more than $67,000 in taxes, according to state records and news reports. Records showed that, just two years before, a company linked to Ladd’s father purchased the property for $1.8 million.

Yet, the financial troubles and strained relationships facing Trouts and Ladd began long before the taxman showed up. In fact, this wasn’t the first time Trouts had been shut down for failing to pay business taxes.

Six months before the state seized Ladd’s business, Simms repossessed most of its inventory and merchandising materials, and soon after sued Ladd in state court for more than $160,000 in overdue invoices. Within months, Ladd faced yet another lawsuit from a second business partner who hadn’t been paid, in this case for leasing river access for Trouts’s guide service.

But these were far from the only people to whom Ladd owed money. Ladd borrowed heavily during the pandemic, moving into a larger home, buying out business partners, and scrambling to pay off other loans. While doing so, he struggled to pay a cavalcade of vendors, employees, and even his life insurance company, to whom he owed nearly $389,000. In total, Ladd’s debt likely approached or even exceeded seven figures, as a shrinking number of vendors in the fly-fishing space were willing to supply him with merchandise.

“The relationship trust was irrevocably broken. It was like a divorce—mom or dad woke up one day and said ‘I can’t do this anymore,’” said Mike Moore, who, as chief revenue officer for Simms, made the call to pull all his company’s products out of Trouts in April 2023. “There was no reason why Trouts shouldn’t have been successful.”

Even as his business was going under, Ladd was publicly optimistic. “The past number of years have presented Trouts with amazing opportunities and extraordinary challenges, and it is my hope to keep the Trouts brand alive and strong moving forward,” Ladd wrote on the Trouts website on October 30, 2023—just after his overdue taxes were paid. The post was titled “To Our Loyal Customers.”

The remnants of Ladd’s once-vibrant business, which had crumbled under crushing debt, were sold off or taken over in bits and pieces, one fly display bin at a time. When Ladd’s marriage ended in the first half of 2024, his father paid the $1.35 million divorce settlement, court records show. The elder Ladd also settled up another $1,200 owed to a contractor—a single mother—who had shuttled Trouts’s guided clients.

“It’s shocking to see how fast the pendulum swung from Trouts being one of the five top retailers to out of business,” Klug said in an interview with Fly Fisherman. “It’s an unprecedented situation for the fly-fishing industry.”

Whether it was one wrong turn or a series of them, mismanagement, or money spent on a lavish lifestyle, Ladd, 44, has no comment on any of it.

“I have spent the last year working to move on from Trouts, and this isn’t something that I’m interested in rehashing,” he wrote in a text message, declining an interview request.

Ladd’s father, Jerry, also declined to discuss the matter. “I do not see any merit to retelling this story,” he wrote in an email. In the end, the demise of Trouts offers a cautionary tale for the otherwise seemingly benign world of feathers and hooks deployed in the hunt for fish—and profit—while also shining a light on an industry more than willing to extend credit and patience with an important dealer. It also closes an era of explosive growth for fly fishing. While scores of fly shops around the country have shuttered in the last 20 years, no others have done so in such a high-profile manner.

Ultimately, the disappearance of Trouts created a void for anglers along the Front Range and beyond, leaving many customers frustrated about what happened, looking for answers, and assigning blame.

“I know the reality of owning a fly shop. Taking one wrong turn can be painful. It’s easy to get in over your head,” said Zeke Hersh, head guide for Trouts and the original owner of Blue River Anglers, which Ladd eventually came to own. “Throughout [Ladd’s] whole tenure there was always something a little off. There was more struggle than actually portrayed.”

Early Years

Years before he owned Trouts, Ladd was a customer.

“What I loved about Trouts is that they didn’t care how old I was. They didn’t care how much I spent. It was more about just offering the positive customer experience,” Ladd stated in a 2019 interview.

Born into a family of oilmen, Ladd grew up in Denver’s toniest enclaves. His father, Jerry Ladd, runs a successful commercial door company. Ladd’s grandfather, J.B. “Bert” Ladd, was a legend in the oil and gas business. He merged his company, Ladd Petroleum Corp., with a mining concern later acquired by General Electric. Upon completion in 1976, the $2.17 billion deal (more than $12 billion in 2025 dollars) was the largest corporate merger in U.S. history, according to The New York Times.

In college, Ladd studied recreation and tourism, according to his LinkedIn profile. In the summers, he worked at a Vail area fly shop and, occasionally, as a fly-fishing guide.

“Tucker was what I’d call a unicorn,” said John Cochran, erstwhile owner of Gorsuch Outfitters, now Vail Valley Anglers, where Ladd cut his teeth in the industry. “He was good with people—he had this absolutely hilarious deep, commanding voice. He understood technology and point-of-sale. And he had a pretty good knowledge of fishing.”

Ladd was out of college in the spring of 2005 when his father learned that Jim Park, the owner of Trout’s Fly Fishing, wanted out. The elder Ladd contacted him, and said he was looking to set up his son in business. He wanted to know why Park was selling the 600-square-foot shop. After a recession and the devastating 2002 Hayman fire on the South Platte, Trouts was struggling with poor credit, low inventory, and fewer customers, Park explained.

“Jerry said to me, ‘That will never happen to Tucker,’” Park said in an interview.

Two years after taking over Trouts, Ladd moved his growing shop to a prime location more than double its previous size—a three-story Victorian house on 6th Avenue in Denver’s posh Country Club (sometimes called Congress Park) neighborhood. And as fly fishing began to boom, Trouts did the same.

Under Ladd’s ownership, Trouts aggressively pursued an online presence through social media channels to create brand awareness, and leaned into growth, building what became one of the top online retailers in fly fishing. As the company’s profile rose, so did Ladd’s stature. He joined the board of AFFTA, and then succeeded Klug as chairman in the fall of 2013.

Tom Sadler, a fly-fishing guide, writer, conservationist, and former AFFTA board chair, said Ladd put aside self-interest to the benefit of the fly-fishing industry.

“He rose to the occasion. He didn’t say ‘I’m too busy to do this.’ He set a high bar to help the overall industry,” Sadler explained. “There were days when I wanted to punch him in the nose. He had opinions, but he stuck to his guns.”

Trouts continued to grow, and in 2014 acquired an outfitter and guide service called Freestone Outfitters. Two years later Ladd bought a 50 percent stake in Blue River Anglers, a guide service and fly shop in Frisco, in Colorado’s ski country, that also gave him sole discretion over daily business operations and decisions, according to Bureau of Land Management records.

Trouts’s payroll also swelled, as the company employed as many as three dozen people. In many cases, Ladd paid wages well above industry standards.

“He was really driven to be successful in the ways he defines success. He was driven to grow,” said Ivan Orsic, who became one of the faces of Trouts as its brand and marketing manager, and was one of Ladd’s last employees to go. “He was driven to have a business that was well regarded, that had a good reputation, publicly.”

While Trouts flourished and Ladd’s ambition expanded, some colleagues and friends saw warning signs of future trouble.

“He was always looking for the next frontier. He was on this wild, expansionary tear for years,” said Cochran, Ladd’s first employer. “We were all looking at him like ‘Good Lord, kid. What are you doing?’ There was so much media, magazines, online. It felt like he was going to sponsor the Denver Broncos.”

Trouble Brewing

The cracks in Trouts’s facade of success began to show around the time Ladd stepped down from the AFFTA board in 2018. Ladd underpaid local sales taxes for the last five months or so of 2018, and had started seeking financing from capital markets, government records show. In February 2019, the City and County of Denver seized Trouts for failing to pay $31,000 in overdue taxes, fees, and penalties, as employees watched helplessly. The delinquent money was quickly paid, and Trouts reopened the next day.

“There was always this underlying uneasiness that existed, but it never felt like it was a house of cards,” said Orsic, who was on duty at the shop the first time it was seized. “I wanted to make my career in fly fishing, and I think that blinded me to a couple of things that might have been more of a red flag in another business.”

Ladd assured his staff that such a snafu wouldn’t happen again. He forged ahead, keeping up appearances as if all were rosy. In October 2019, Ladd went on Klug’s podcast, saying how good business was.

“The fly shop world, at least in our neck of the woods, has been booming,” Ladd stated. When Covid hit a few months later, Trouts managed to stay well stocked because of Ladd’s relationships with vendors and, perhaps, because he was already on the hook with them. By most accounts, the pandemic was good for Trouts.

In the summer of 2020 Trouts moved into a new location at 1025 Zuni St. Simms, Umpqua, and G.Loomis helped underwrite or support elements of the buildout with stunning displays in what was an even better-looking store than the one Klug had described a few months before. Trouts had its own multimedia studio, a deck overlooking the South Platte, and space that beckoned people. At its peak, Trouts was running 1,000 guided trips a year.

After several contentious years of being in business together, Ladd finally bought out his three partners in the Frisco store in 2022, a year after Ladd’s father purchased the building and land that housed the expanded Trouts shop in Denver.

And yet, Covid also masked Trouts’s core weaknesses—if not of the business then at least of Ladd, according to industry insiders. Ladd borrowed from at least four different funders in total, including one company registered in Luxembourg, according to Colorado state records. Although it’s unclear how much money Ladd took overall, one lender stated that in 2022 he loaned Trouts a sum “in the low six figures—closer to $100,000.”

As Ladd juggled his debts, his company’s relationship with a key vendor took a turn for the worse in June 2022. Umpqua, which had supplied hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of flies, tools, materials, and accessories to Trouts, scaled back its shipments because of Ladd’s failure to pay, Orsic said. Trouts then quickly sold out of its existing Umpqua supply, leaving its bins of the most popular flies largely empty.

More trouble mounted for Trouts later that summer. In August 2022 Ladd had fallen behind paying taxes to the state, public records show. Then Trouts stopped making payments to Simms. By October 2022, Trouts owed Simms nearly $70,000, according to court records. As the year came to a close, that number climbed above $100,000 as Simms continued to send products.

Among the shop’s staff, it was an open secret that Ladd’s father, who had set up his son in business more than 15 years before, had been helping keep Trouts afloat. How much money the elder Ladd provided his son is unclear. But Tucker Ladd continued to seek financing in 2022. He went back to one lender a second time earlier that year, and then asked for a loan that eventually landed him in court.

In October 2022, Ladd requested to borrow against his whole life insurance policy with MassMutual, which approved a loan of $21,280.33, court records show. Instead, MassMutual sent him $410,237.59 because of a clerical error.

When the insurance company realized its mistake in January 2023 and asked for its money back, Ladd told MassMutual he’d already spent it. In January 2024, MassMutual sued Ladd in U.S. District Court in Colorado for failing to pay back $388,957.26, but dropped the suit in April 2024. Neither MassMutual nor its attorney responded to requests for comment.

Distress Signals

“You can’t expect a rational reaction from someone in distress,” said Kristen Mustad, president of Florida-based Nautilus Reels, who by October 2022 also stopped shipping his products to Trouts. “I think Tucker went off the deep end.”

Mustad is among several industry insiders who lay some of the blame with manufacturers who continued to do business with Trouts, even when the retailer was struggling to pay. The crash would have come sooner, and fewer people would have been hurt, if the big-name brands had stopped shipping, he said.

“The industry kept talking about how his dad would always keep bailing him out. Everyone was banking on that rumor,” Mustad said. “I think the industry helped him go that way.”

Fixtures and Signals

By the time Moore and a rented Ryder truck pulled up to Trouts in April 2023, the business was a sad, faded memory of the fly shop Klug described just a few years before. Moore arrived after Ladd failed to pay the tens of thousands of dollars he owed for waders, clothing, and accessories. Ladd had been warned ahead of time to box up all the Simms products.

“For me, going in there, it was more of a resignation: ‘It’s come to this.’ There was a sadness to it,” said Moore, who is now with Far Bank Enterprises. “They had very little product. They didn’t have all the things you would need to go fly fishing. It was picked over like a Soviet grocery store.”

With the moving truck backed up to the building’s loading dock, Moore and another Simms employee started to haul out boxes of product. It was tense and awkward, as Moore removed fixtures and displays from the walls. Just about everything with the Simms name on it was carted out the door.

“Ladd came out to ask if I was really taking the fixtures and pictures too,” Moore said. After Moore assured him he was, Ladd went back into his office and shut the door. “That’s the last I saw of him.”

In June 2023, Montana-based Simms sued Trouts, Ladd, and his various aliases in state court for $191,619.42 in unpaid invoices plus interest. Ladd had failed to make payments after entering into an agreement. By October 2023, just after Trouts was seized, a state judge ruled for Simms in the amount of $197,117.93.

Moore waved off the suggestion that manufacturers shouldered any blame for continuing to supply Ladd. Rather, it was Ladd’s failure to come to terms with his situation, he said.

“He had an uncanny ability to not share bad news with anybody,” Moore said.

“I don’t know where all the money went, but to say Trouts was leveraged to the hilt doesn’t say how overleveraged this thing was.”

For Sadler, who has spent decades in the fly-fishing business, the loss of a fly shop is one that is felt deeply in the community and beyond.

“Brick-and-mortar shops are essential to this industry. When you lose one, you feel the loss because of the individual involved, but you also feel the loss of community,” he said. “If you feel like you can buy a rod without casting it, you’re making a fool’s mistake.”

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Andrew Becker has been an investigative reporter, journalist, and editor for more than 25 years, working in print, broadcast and digital. His reporting has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, among other national and regional newspapers, as well as on National Public Radio and PBS/Frontline. He was a staff writer for The Center for Investigative Reporting + Reveal and has a master’s degree from UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in Salt Lake City, where he is an avid angler, skier, climber and trail runner.

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