About Us
Hi!
It’s nice to meet you. We invented SimmerShield here in beautiful British Columbia. If you’re interested, please allow us to introduce ourselves.
We’ve been (thoroughly mediocre) outdoor adventurers for a long while. We both cut our teeth car camping with our families as kids, then did some backpacking with our friends in college. These were the typical “borrowed ancient, heavy gear from your uncles’ shed and schlepped it a few km in from the trailhead” types of trips, but we didn’t know any better and had some great weekends.
After college we slowly fell out of love with backpacking. We instead spent most of our outdoors time climbing and mountain biking, with a bit of bicycle touring thrown in.
Bicycle touring led to bikepacking, and we found ourselves looking for more remote bikepacking trips to wilder, more beautiful places. We eventually learned that if we wanted to get to the raddest places in the mountains, we needed to sometimes ditch the bikes and head out on foot.
This brought us around full circle, back to backpacking. We did this grudgingly at first, still grumbling about backpacking being less fun than bicycles. Too much work!
Fortunately, we soon discovered the ultralight philosophy, and since that awakening we’ve been busy learning a lot from that community, making a few trips, and building out our gear systems. Oh man, backpacking gear improved SO MUCH during our decade of absence.
Through this learning experience we tried out a few different types of stoves, but remained disappointed by the available options. We wanted the efficiency of an integrated canister stove but without the associated weight and bulk. One of us used to be a combustion design engineer, and we both consider ourselves inventors/makers, so we resolved to make our own system – the exact one we wanted. As we write this, we’ve been prototyping and testing (in the field and in the “lab”) for over a year. We are really proud of the resulting product.
Somewhere along the way we realized that other people might want to buy the stove system we were making for ourselves. Since then we’ve been busy solidifying our online business skills. We are not mega-pros yet but we think we have our feet pretty well under us, so order with confidence!
We got so psyched on backpacking this year that that we’d planned a southbound thru-hike on the PCT this year. COVID-19 destroyed that plan, but we were able to get out for two socially-distanced months on the GDT for a long-term field test. If you browse through our instagram, you can see our real-world fuel efficiency data from that trip. SimmerShield worked perfectly for us all season, so we’re now even more excited to share it with you.
