Pioneers: Chuck and Jann Perkins, Living the Alpine Spirit
Founders of Vermont's Alpine Shop, the couple still lives and breathes skiing.
Chuck and Jann Perkins have spent a lifetime saving things so that others can enjoy them. That is their legacy, and this is their story.
Photo top: After 29 years running the Alpine Shop, in 1993 Chuck and Jann (right) handed off management to their daughter Peg and her husband Scott Rieley. Courtesy Jann Perkins.
Chuck Perkins Jr. was born in Burlington, Vermont. Perkins Sr. was a physician, and Perkins Pier on the Burlington waterfront is named for him. The younger Chuck’s passion for everything Alpine began at the age of five, when his mom and dad bought him a pair of skis. He would walk up and ski down hills throughout Burlington. When he was 12, he moved up to the rope tow at the Underhill Ski Bowl.
Neither of his parents skied, but they saw a passion in their son. When he was in his teens, they began bringing him to Stowe, where he learned how to ski properly as they spent the day in the lodge.
Jann Couture was born in East Springfield, Massachusetts. When Chuck was a teenager, his parents rented a summer camp in Colchester, on Lake Champlain, where the Coutures also vacationed. Chuck, a talkative and friendly fellow, struck up a conversation with Jann’s father, who introduced him to his daughter Jann.
That was the start of a lifelong team. In 1954 Jann received Chuck’s University of Vermont (UVM) fraternity pin. In 1955 he was drafted into the army and gave her an engagement ring. In 1956 they were married.
Stationed in San Antonio, Texas, when they got married, Chuck worked part time for JCPenney. Discharged in 1957, Chuck pivoted to a full-time job with the retailer. The newlyweds were thrilled when the company relocated them to Chuck’s hometown of Burlington.
Jann had never skied. Chuck took her up the single chair at Mad River Glen. All trails off the summit were marked expert, but Chuck told her she could ski down, and she did. They remained married.
The couple bought a 35-foot mobile home and dragged it behind their 1953 Mercury convertible to the Lakeview Mobile Home Park in Shelburne, Vermont, where they lived for five years. “We did not begin in any kind of mansion, but those were very happy times,” says Chuck. Their son, Chuck Perkins III, was born in 1963, followed by their daughter, Peg, three years later.
Start of a Retail Legacy
Chuck eventually left his job at Penney’s and in 1963, the couple bought a plot of land with a small house on Williston Road in South Burlington, about a mile and a half east of UVM’s campus. They sold the house to an outdoorsman who wanted it for his hunting camp. He paid $100 and removed it, leaving the lot open for the ski shop Chuck and Jann intended to build.
With a DIY attitude and $30,000, they built the Alpine Shop, styled as a Swiss chalet, with their own hands, using bricks from the old furnaces at UVM and rock hauled from Westford. With their son watching from his playpen, the Perkinses created the shop brick by brick, stone by stone, rafter by rafter.
They worked hard, and fast. It took just one summer to complete the building, and the store opened in November 1963. In the beginning, they had more bad days than good at the cash register, but the Perkinses persevered, and over the next 30 years they built their business into one of New England’s most beloved ski shops.
When you are with Chuck and Jann Perkins, you realize they have an indomitable love for life—a joyful, optimistic and contagious enthusiasm that they share with everyone they meet.
In 1993 they gave the Alpine Shop to daughter Peg and her husband, Scott Rieley. Chuck and Jann held onto the original building and land. After running the shop for nearly two decades, Peg and Scott sold the business in 2011. The new owners relocated the shop in 2022 to Shelburne Road, where it continues to thrive.
A Prosperous Life
Says Chuck, “I have always had a mind for business.” The couple invested profits from the ski shop into real estate, buying property from the early days onward, “not to sell, but to hold.” Today they are among the largest real estate owners in Stowe, which Chuck says is “our favorite place because of the skiing and mountains, and it’s only 45 minutes from Burlington.”
They believe in sweat equity. Many of the buildings they purchased needed to be refurbished. They did all the work from the ground up. Chuck devised a simple business model: “Buy when you’re 20, with a 20-year mortgage. By the time you’re 40, you’ve paid off the mortgage, and you don’t sell. You buy another property, and another, and that is how you build your holdings.”
Prosperity allowed the couple to have adventures. They took their young kids to hike the Abol Trail on Mount Katahdin in Maine. Chuck took Peg to Yosemite on a motorcycle, then rode with his son to Alaska. They have been to Antarctica three times and to the Arctic, on the Russian research ship Akademik Ioffe. They hiked the Haute Route from Chamonix to Zermatt, then climbed the Matterhorn. In 1980, when the kids were in high school, the Perkinses lived in a small log cabin outside of Fairbanks, Alaska. Chuck shares, “We wanted to go to Alaska, and I thought it would be a neat place, so we decided to just do it. We bought an old Shasta trailer and an old Ford Bronco truck all banged up—we looked like the Clampetts going to Alaska.”
Preserving the Past
One of the publications the Alpine Shop advertised in was The Vermont Ski News. One day in 1988 its publisher, Roy Newton, made one of his regular visits to the shop. Chuck recalls that Newton had a proposition: “Chuck,” he said, “I’m starting a ski museum, and I need a board of directors. Would you be interested?” Chuck responded, “I’m your man!”
With the help of a group of Stowe business owners, including the Perkinses, the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Museum was established in Stowe. The town owned a historic but abandoned and condemned meeting house. Museum supporters figured they could save the building and find a home for the museum at the same time. “The city gave us the building for $1 a year for 50 years,” Jann says. “Chuck came home and said ‘We are going to get it done, Jann. I just gave them all the money for the museum,’” Jann now serves on the museum board, and the Perkins name is on the front of the building.
Preserving the history of snowsports remains a driving dynamic for the couple. They joined ISHA and became reliable donors after Chuck came home and told Jann, “I saw a poster for a movie that this group ISHA is having up on the mountain—Fire and Ice—and they are talking about Walter Prager.”
Jann knew Prager through the ski shop. The Swiss skier was the world downhill champion in 1931 and 1933, then came to the U.S. to coach the Dartmouth ski team. He served in the 10th Mountain Division, designed several ski resorts and was elected to the U.S. Ski Hall of Fame in 1977. Jann, in awe of the man, was intrigued by an event and movie that addressed his life.
The 10th Mountain Division is another of the couple’s great loves, and they spend a lot of time keeping the division’s history alive. In 2018, Chuck and Jann helped underwrite a 10th Mountain exhibit at the Vermont museum. After admiring the 13-foot bronze statue of a 10th Mountain trooper by the covered bridge in Vail, they tracked down the sculptor, Scott Stearman, and commissioned a duplicate to be located at Spruce Peak Plaza at Stowe Mountain Resort. Today the monument stands at the Perkins’s residence in Stowe.
The Perkinses are now converting the original Alpine Shop building into a museum to exhibit their lifelong collection of memorabilia and artifacts. They’ve named the venture the Alpine Spirit Museum. “This is an evolving thing,” Jann says. “We did not know what to do with the empty building.” They plan eventually to open it to the public.
The Perkinses themselves were inducted into the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2024 as “preeminent advocates and philanthropists in the snowsports community.” Previously, they had been inducted into the Vermont Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame in 2017. Chuck still skis at age 94, and the couple routinely drives all over the country to visit ski areas. They remain a recognized fixture at ski-industry events, too.
As far as what’s next, the Perkinses recently purchased the historic Gilbert’s Hill property in Woodstock, Vermont, which is celebrated as the birthplace of lift-served skiing in the U.S. It’s the site of what’s said to be the country’s first rope tow, installed by enthusiasts in 1934 and powered by a Ford Model T engine. Why purchase Gilbert’s Hill at this stage of their lives? “To save it,” Chuck answers simply. 
Melinda Moulton was instrumental in the redevelopment of the Burlington, Vermont, waterfront. She is the executive producer and co-founder of Rick Moulton Productions and writes for various publications. Moulton also hosts a television show and recently released her children’s book Bobby Blue.