Sims

This site looks a much better with Flash and JavaScript!

Tom Sims

Rider Details

Favorite Mountains:Sun Valley, All Aspen area mountains, Telluride, Mammoth & June, the entire Tahoe area, also Silverton, CO. I'd like to give special thanks to those few ski areas that allowed me on their slopes in the 70's and early 80's...Slide Mountain (Nevada...now Mt. Rose), Mt. Waterman (in the mountains above Los Angeles), Soda Springs (Tahoe), Mt. Baker (Washington), Ski Cooper (Colorado), and Berthoud Pass (Colorado). On a sidenote, I would like to "not thank" Deer Valley and Alta for still being so lame.


What got you into riding a snowboard?I was skateboarding just about every day in Haddonfield, NJ from the time I was 10 years old, which was the same age when I started skiing as well. When it snowed I couldn't skateboard on the snow and ice-covered streets. Out of sheer desperation to go riding, I came up with the idea of "skateboarding on the snow."  So in Nov/Dec 1963, in my 7th grade woodshop class, I built what I then called a "skiboard", which is now on display in the Colorado Ski & Snowboard Museum in Vail as the world's first snowboard.


Who are the riders that impress and inspire you the most and why?That would definitely be Steve Fisher and the whole SIMS team because they launch rocks and cliffs that blow me away, and they do it with killer style.


If you could pick any song in the world to use in a video part what would it be?The only video you would see me in these days would be in a heli-powder sequence. I think it would be cool to have the soundtrack be me jamming on my 1970 Gibson solid body Les Paul.


When you aren't shredding what are you up to?My leisure time is spent doing a lot of different things...including skateboarding, surfing, and wakeboarding with the family...golf tournaments with my wife, Hilary...playing guitar and tending to our 500 avocado trees.


How many avocados do you grow on your farm each year?Last year we harvested over 150,000 Organic Hass avocados from our ranch.


Do you still surf? What are your favorite spots?I used to surf the Hollister Ranch and Rincon a lot, but now I wait for El Capitan Point to be going off since it's right in front of our house and it has one of the best tubes on the California coast. Cabo and Costa Rica are also favorite spots where I really enjoy surfing.


Do you still skate? How often?My wife and I are always keeping an eye out for freshly paved streets because I still really enjoy cruising and carving on my 5 foot longboard, especially during the summer flat spells in Santa Barbara.


As one of the pioneers of snowboarding how does it feel to go out on the hill these days and see so many people shredding?It makes me feel tremendously proud to see how big the sport has become and how radically the Pro-Riders push the sport to the extreme. During my first 20 years of snowboarding I could only talk a handful of friends into riding. It's always amazed me how long it took for the sport to become popular and how much resistance I received from all of the ski areas. My appearance as a James Bond stunt double in the 1985 movie, "A View To a Kill", is what finally brought snowboarding the respect that it deserved and exposed the sport to millions. Finally sending the message to ski areas that snowboarding had arrived. It's no secret that the sport of snowboarding has saved the winter sports industry as well as countless ski areas from bankruptcy. Skiing itself was a dying sport until they snitched the deep side cut and wider design from the snowboard and stuck it on skis (AKA...the parabolic ski). It's hilarious to me to look back and remember how many ski area managers told me to my face that they would never, ever, allow snowboarding on their mountains!  


Which 09/10 Sims board do you prefer to ride?The Bamboo Ultimate Vice for resort riding and the Steve Fisher model board for pow.

Rider Photo

Tom Sims