The Meteoric Rise and Fall of a Denver Fly Shop

For years, Trouts Fly Fishing was everywhere on social media—producing gorgeous Youtube videos on flies and techniques, regularly posting to Facebook and Instagram—and then it just disappeared. A fascinating story in Fly Fisherman by Andrew Becker features interviews with several of the players in this story and details how it all went wrong.

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. . . . 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.

Read the full story in Fly Fisherman