STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK

Chuck Ferries, who competed in the 1960 and 1964 Olympics in Squaw Valley and Innsbruck, Austria, has passed away at his home in Sun Valley.

Charles Thompson Ferries III passed away on April 17, 2025, at age 85 after suffering from dementia for a few years.

Ferries, the son of a dentist, was a Yooper, having grown up in Houghton on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He learned to ski on a 440-foot mountain named Mt. Ripley and at age 7 he and his three siblings joined a junior ski team run by Michigan Tech University.

Chuck Ferries played a major role in developing and marketing K2 and Pre skis.

He won his first slalom at 10. And by 13 he was beating college racers, according to 10th Mountain Division veteran and MTU ski coach Fred Lonsdorf.

At 14 he finished in the top 10 at the Junior Nationals in Jackson, Wyo.

He fell in love with the Rockies during his time at Junior Nationals. And, two years later in 1955, he climbed out of his bedroom window, lowered his ski gear to the ground by rope and ran away from home to catch a train west to Sun Valley.

There was no snow yet in Sun Valley when he got off the train, according to an article in the December 2009 issue of Skiing History magazine. So, he stayed just three hours before heading to Alta, Utah, where he learned to ski powder with Alf Engen until breaking an ankle early in the season.

The Sun Valley Wintersports Hall of Fame has a plaque honoring Chuck Ferries’ dedication to ski racing.

The following year—at 17--he moved to Aspen where he finished fourth in the Roch Cup slalom behind Toni Sailer, Christian Pravda and Tom Corcoran. In 1958 he won the Roch Cup GS and downhill and the first of three national slalom titles in Alyeska, Alaska, where he gained a love of flying bush planes.

He was named to the U.S. ski Team in 1960, making the Olympic team that year. He continued his winning ways beating Buddy Werner in Alta’s Snow Cup slalom in 1961. And in 1962 he became the first and only American to win Kitzbuehel’s Hahnenkamm before taking the slalom at Cortina d’Ampezzo, as well.

His sister Barbara won the downhill bronze at the Chamonix World Championships that same year.

As the 1964 Olympics rose on the horizon, Ferries was featured on the cover of Sports illustrated magazine as “Chuck Ferries—Best U.S. Skier.”

Unfortunately, he fell in the slalom in Innsbruck, ending his dreams of Olympic glory. His fall and Buddy Werner’s did, however, open the door for Billy Kidd and Jimmie Heuga to medal.

Instead of returning to the University of Denver where he had been studying business, Ferries retired from competitive skiing at 24 and headed to Seattle as a sales rep for Head Skis.

He coached the U.S. women’s alpine team through the 1968 Olympics, then joined K2 on a handshake, helping the company develop its first line of light foam-core fiberglass race skis on Vashon Island.

In 1976 he returned to Sun Valley where he worked for Wintersports International, selling U.S. ski equipment overseas. He then created Precision skis, or PRE, for K2, taking on the skis’ marketing, distribution and sales.

The sale of K2 skis grew from 20,000 pairs a year when he started to a quarter million by the time he left.

In 1981 he and fellow Sun Valley resident Bob Smith, founder of Smith Optics, saved Scott USA from bankruptcy.  They used Scott USA to sell the goggles that Smith invented and reestablished Scott as the world’s best seller of ski poles.

Ferries launched Scott USA’s mountain bike line in 1986 and six years later bought the Schwinn bicycle company, making it profitable again. And Scott USA became a top global developer and distributor of mountain bikes, motorcycle goggles and accessories under his leadership.

Ferries retired in 1997 only to come out of retirement in 2002 when he, his son Tom and son-in-law Mike Neary bought Chums, a Utah manufacturer making cloth eyeglass retainers.

He served on the Board of Directors for the U.S. Ski Team for several years.

Ferries was named to the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 1989. And he was inducted into the Sun Valley Ski Hall of Fame’s inaugural class alongside Nelson Bennett, Christin Cooper, Bobbie Burns, Leif Odmark and others in 2010.

Ferries was married to Nancy Ferries.