A fellow Arapahoe Basin Ski Area patrolman watches as a 20-something John Simms does one of his signature back flips at the Colorado resort, circa 1962.
John Simms holds one of the ski poles he invented years ago that could be quickly converted into an avalanche probe. On Aug. 24, Simms will be inducted into the Utah-based Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame in the “innovation and development” category.
John Simms first came to Jackson Hole in the summer of 1965 to spend a summer as a fishing guide. He became the area’s go-to guide over the years, taking the likes of former Vice President Dick Cheney on his boat, and spent his winters as an avalanche expert at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort.
Simms wears a cochlear implant for hearing loss caused by firing avalanche guns. “I might shoot 25 rounds in a day,” said Simms, one of two new inductions into the Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame in Park City, Utah, this month.
John Simms with his custom wrapped boat. Simms is being inducted to the Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame next week in the “innovations and development” category. A longtime Jackson Hole fishing guide, Simms also served as a U.S. Forest Service snow ranger at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort and is credited with saving countless lives for inventions such as a collapsible snow shovel and ski poles that could be converted into avalanche probes.
John Simms is set to be inducted into the Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame on Aug. 24 in Park City, Utah. A lifelong skier, Simms spent years working as a U.S. Forest Service snow ranger at Arapahoe and Vail resorts in Colorado before helping open Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in 1966.
John Simms is standing in his backyard and telling us how he did it.
“I used to be able to go along with my ski poles,” he says, motioning with his arms, “and plant my pole and do a somersault through [them]. Then I thought, ‘I bet I could do that on skis.’ ”
Just an 85-year-old man telling a tale? Maybe. But then you look at that old photo, the Colorado sky perfectly blue in the background, his upside-down legs perfectly perpendicular to his skis, and you believe him.
There’s no doubt — Simms has always gone head-over-heels for skiing, since those first days on the slopes as a kid in Upstate New York during World War II. And the sport would say the feeling is mutual — now more than ever.
A week from today, the longtime Jackson Hole resident, who lives on 5 acres of lovely property in a 1915 homesteader cabin in South Park with his wife, Barbara, will be inducted into the Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame in Park City, Utah.
Since its inception during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, the Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame has inducted 83 individuals, including famed Jackson skier and Olympic gold medalist Pepi Stiegler in 2004, for their “exemplary achievements and contributions toward the excellence of winter sports” in Utah, Idaho and Wyoming.
A fellow Arapahoe Basin Ski Area patrolman watches as a 20-something John Simms does one of his signature back flips at the Colorado resort, circa 1962.
Simms and this year’s other inductee, 1992 and 1994 Winter Olympian Luke Bodensteiner, now general manager/sports development director at Utah’s Soldier Hollow Nordic Center, cross-country skiing training venue, will bump the hall’s count to 85. Simms is being inducted into the hall’s “innovation and development” category.
For almost six decades Simms has lived in Jackson Hole and made a name for himself as an expert angler and fishing guide, a U.S. Forest Service snow ranger and ski patrolman, a ski innovator and inventor, an entrepreneur and an award-winning sculptor of unusual — and often large — geometric installations.
He started his fishing equipment company, Simms Fishing, which he sold in 1993 and is now based out of Bozeman, Montana, back in 1980. But it’s another company he started, and also sold, Life-Link International, based on inventions he began while working as a ski patrolman in Jackson Hole in the 1970s, that’s credited with saving countless lives.
And this is the part where tears start to form in Simms’ eyes — and his voice starts to choke.
“It wasn’t to make money, it was to save lives and to make people feel jubilant about rescuing someone instead of, ‘What could I have done?’ ” says Simms, who tinkered in his old Jackson shop for years to create both collapsible shovels and ski poles to aid in the search for avalanche victims.
“Just imagine your wife or husband is buried, maybe even a foot is sticking out [of the snow],” Simms says. “You can’t do anything with your hands. So, you try to use the heel of your ski and the snow just slides off, and by that time you’re in a panic situation.”
‘Can’t get any better’
Born in Jamestown, New York, in 1937, Simms grew up the youngest of two boys who were two years apart in the small town that’s just a few miles from Lake Erie.
John Simms first came to Jackson Hole in the summer of 1965 to spend a summer as a fishing guide. He became the area’s go-to guide over the years, taking the likes of former Vice President Dick Cheney on his boat, and spent his winters as an avalanche expert at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort.
Both of his parents were skiers, something Simms says was unusual back in the 1930s and ’40s. They first took him and his brother, Gordon, 2 years older, to the Holiday Valley Ski Area about 20 miles east of Jamestown.
“And it was really, really steep,” Simms remembers. He had “a buddy about my age, and we’d really challenge each other.”
A tow gripper attached to their belts would pull them up the mountain and “when you got to the top, you’d just release it.” They’d put the tow gripper between their knees and ski with their feet together. “And that was in the days when post people were wide-tracking,” Simms says. “So, I grew up skiing parallel, which was really unusual.”
As a teen in the early 1950s, Simms’ mother would pick him and his friends up and take them skiing in Allegheny State Park. Then he went away to a prep school, The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, and the kids would ski at Mohawk Mountain Ski Area. The school also bordered a golf course that would ice up in the winter, and Simms learned to ski on ice and also began teaching himself how to flip with his ski poles, and then on skis.
John Simms with his custom wrapped boat. Simms is being inducted to the Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame next week in the “innovations and development” category. A longtime Jackson Hole fishing guide, Simms also served as a U.S. Forest Service snow ranger at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort and is credited with saving countless lives for inventions such as a collapsible snow shovel and ski poles that could be converted into avalanche probes.
Simms enrolled in the Navy after graduation and spent a couple of years as a radarman on the North Atlantic before returning home to work at his family’s company, Jamestown Veneer and Plywood, started by his maternal grandfather and later run by his father. There, Simms was often trying to find better ways of doing things for the company. It was the genesis of his inventive streak that would later reap rewards, he says.
But wanderlust soon set in. In 1961, Simms and a buddy decided to put their ski rack on the back of the 1953 Jaguar XK120 that Simms bought from a guy in town and head west.
The road trip took them to Georgetown, Colorado, where Simms got a job bartending at night and then hit the slopes at Arapahoe Basin Ski Area during the day, “and I just fell in love with it,” he says. It was a chance meeting on one of those first days, with the area ski manager, who had noticed Simms’ skiing ability and his general fitness.
“Would you like to be a professional ski patrolman?” the manager asked him. “I’ve never heard of it,” Simms replied.
“You take care of people who get hurt on the mountain, take them down in a toboggan,” the manager said.
“I don’t know anything about first aid,” Simms told him.
“We can teach you first aid in one night,” the manager said.
And just like that, Simms became a ski patrolman before his 25th birthday. “And I thought, ‘God, it can’t get any better than this,” Simms says. “Getting paid to ski?”
But when tragedy struck on the mountain, the learning curve was fast.
Broken ankles and legs — and then very early into this new adventure a dark day on the Pallavicini Run, one of Colorado’s most iconic.
“In those days, people didn’t know much about avalanches,” Simms says. “Blocks of snow the size of a car. Hard snow, as hard as this table,” he says, rapping his knuckles on the side table that’s holding the homemade lime lemonade made by Barbara. “And the victim, every limb was dislocated. He was all lacerated and everything. He was beat up and dead. You don’t survive a hard-slab avalanche.”
But it wouldn’t be the last death Simms would see on the slopes.
Simms spent three years at Arapahoe Basin, meeting his first wife, Betty, a ski instructor, there, and also becoming ski patrol director. The two would take jobs at the new Vail Ski Resort in Colorado not long after it opened, and Simms would educate himself on avalanches by taking classes through the U.S. Forest Service and start tinkering with inventing better ski goggles that didn’t fog up and neoprene cuffs on ski pants to keep the snow out.
And his wild side would come out at Vail’s famed Copper Bar.
“The night life at Vail was really beyond anything we could comprehend,” he says. “As ski patrolmen, we couldn’t do wrong,” he says with a laugh. “We were like local heroes.” The marriage to Betty didn’t last.
In 1965, Simms came north to Jackson Hole and spent a summer guiding on the Snake River. The new Jackson Hole Mountain Resort was in its infancy and would open that coming winter. Simms took a job as a ski patrolman and found a place on a dude ranch north of town with second wife, Dinah. They would buy a place on Fish Creek Road north of Wilson and have two daughters, Evan and Morrison, and Simms would ride his snowmobile to work at the resort.
Simms wears a cochlear implant for hearing loss caused by firing avalanche guns. “I might shoot 25 rounds in a day,” said Simms, one of two new inductions into the Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame in Park City, Utah, this month.
And his interest in avalanches and snow safety would continue into the 1970s and beyond and help revolutionize ski area and backcountry snow-safety procedures.
Simms is credited with developing both a collapsible snow shovel and ski poles that could be turned into avalanche probes, along with helping simplify evaluation and forecasting techniques based on snow samples to predict where avalanches might occur. By the 1950s, using heavy artillery to create controlled avalanches became commonplace.
Simms estimates he fired around 25 rounds a day with a 75-mm recoilless rifle to create controlled avalanches in hopes of preventing natural ones. That’s why he now wears a hearing implant behind his right ear.
A 2005 Avalanche Review article described how in temperatures around 30 below zero at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in the mid-70s, Simms drove a van over his first example of a shovel blade designed and molded out of Lexan polycarbonate so the front wheel came to rest on top of the downward-turned blade. It held, thus it was strong enough to use in avalanche rescue work.
John Simms holds one of the ski poles he invented years ago that could be quickly converted into an avalanche probe. On Aug. 24, Simms will be inducted into the Utah-based Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame in the “innovation and development” category.
“My little invention saved a lot of lives, because the ski patrol could immediately go to the site and start searching, and a lot of the ski patrolmen would actually ski with a shovel on their back,” Simms says.
One of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort’s most famous, and steepest, runs is called S&S Couloir after Simms and his buddy Charlie Sands. They were the first ski patrollers to drop into the run, which begins with a 20-foot drop, and swore never to say who went first, according to local legend.
“I’ve always kind of enjoyed excitement,” Simms says.
Contact Mark Baker at 732-7065 or sports@jhnewsandguide.com.
Jackson Hole's John Simms, an internationally acclaimed snow avalanche researcher, is being inducted into the Intermountain Ski Hall of Fame in Park City, Utah, on Aug. 24, along with former U.S. Winter Olympics team member Luke Bodensteiner.
Your comment has been submitted.
There was a problem reporting this.
Please note: Online comments may also run in our print publications. Keep it clean. Please avoid obscene, vulgar, lewd, racist or sexually-oriented language. Please turn off your CAPS LOCK. No personal attacks. Discuss issues & opinions rather than denigrating someone with an opposing view. No political attacks. Refrain from using negative slang when identifying political parties. Be truthful. Don’t knowingly lie about anyone or anything. Be proactive. Use the “Report” link on each comment to let us know of abusive posts. Share with us. We’d love to hear eyewitness accounts or history behind an article. Use your real name: Anonymous commenting is not allowed. . The News&Guide welcomes comments from our paid subscribers. Tell us what you think. Thanks for engaging in the conversation!
Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to read or post comments.
Sorry, no promotional deals were found matching that code.
Promotional Rates were found for your code.
Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device.
Sign up to receive local, breaking news alerts as they become available.
Sign up to receive a weekly e-newsletter with a selection of healthcare and wellness news from the Jackson Hole News&Guide.
Sign up to receive a weekly e-newsletter with a selection of private, public and continuing education news from the Jackson Hole News&Guide.
Sign up to receive a monthly e-newsletter with a selection of photography and video from the Jackson Hole News&Guide.
Sign up to receive a weekly e-newsletter with a selection of town and county government news from the Jackson Hole News&Guide.
Sign up to receive a weekly e-newsletter with a selection of arts and entertainment headlines from the Scene section of Jackson Hole News&Guide.
Sign up to receive a weekly e-newsletter with a selection of economic and business news from the Jackson Hole News&Guide.
Sign up to receive a weekly e-newsletter with a selection of environmental news from the Jackson Hole News&Guide.
Sign up to receive a weekly e-newsletter with a spotlight on Jackson Hole's crime, justice and emergency news from the Jackson Hole News&Guide.
Sign up to receive a daily e-newsletter with a selection of local, state and regional news headlines from the Jackson Hole Daily.
Sign up to receive a weekly e-newsletter with a selection of inspiring stories about the faces and places of Jackson Hole from the Jackson Hole News&Guide.
Sign up to receive a weekly e-newsletter with a selection of outdoors, sports and recreation news from the Jackson Hole News&Guide.
Sign up to receive a weekly e-newsletter with a selection of trending local news headlines from the Jackson Hole News&Guide.
Sign up to receive a weekly e-newsletter with a selection of news headlines from the Jackson Hole News&Guide.
Your account has been registered, and you are now logged in.
Check your email for details.
Invalid password or account does not exist
Submitting this form below will send a message to your email with a link to change your password.
An email message containing instructions on how to reset your password has been sent to the e-mail address listed on your account.
Your purchase was successful, and you are now logged in.
A receipt was sent to your email.