Mike Brunetto and the Soul of Research Dynamics: A Sun Valley Story

The ski world lost a giant on February 25, 2026. Mike Brunetto — founder of Research Dynamics (RD) and Wolf Skis, one-quarter Cherokee, composer, farmer, engineer, and one of the most gifted ski builders who ever pressed a core — passed away at the age of 86. Born July 10, 1939, he spent the better part of six decades reshaping what a ski could be.

This is not a press release. It is not a product page. It is a tribute from LongSkisTruck™ Creative Studio, built on years of collecting the skis he built, researching the history he created, and listening to the stories of the people who were there.

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The Résumé Before the Garage

Before Research Dynamics existed, Mike Brunetto had already built skis for some of the most significant brands in the industry: Head, Dura-Fiber, The Ski, Lynx, and K2. That list is not a footnote — it is the foundation. By the time he started RD in a Ketchum, Idaho garage in 1975, he had more hands-on construction experience than most factory engineers accumulate in an entire career.

He was not a designer working from blueprints. He was not a marketer building a brand story. He was the person actually laying up fiberglass, pressing cores, and finishing edges. He understood ski construction from the inside out — literally — and that knowledge is what separated RD from every other boutique brand of the era.

Dick Dorworth, the legendary Sun Valley skier, speed record holder, and one of the most respected voices in mountain culture, described Brunetto in a 1998 Idaho Mountain Express profile as a genuine renaissance man: one-quarter Cherokee, a composer, a farmer who would later tend a 900-acre operation, a student of physics, and a man whose curiosity never settled in one place for long. He was, in Dorworth's words, a man of rare and restless intelligence.

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The Ketchum Garage: 1975

Research Dynamics was born in a garage. That is not a romantic embellishment — it is the literal origin. In 1975, Brunetto set up in Ketchum and began building skis under his own name, on his own terms, for the terrain he knew better than anyone: the steep, demanding, unforgiving runs of Sun Valley's Bald Mountain.

The name "Research Dynamics" was not chosen by accident. It reflected his engineering philosophy. He was not copying what worked. He was researching what could work — testing materials, geometries, and construction methods with the same methodical intensity a wildcatter brings to a new drilling site. He had worked in the oil fields. He understood what it meant to bet on an unknown and build toward a result.

Brunetto tested his own designs on his backyard mountain — Baldy. He could be seen driving around Ketchum in his old Apache pickup truck with quivers of skis in the bed, headed up the mountain to put his latest work through its paces. That hands-on, build-it-and-ski-it approach was the core of his process.

The early RD skis built a following quickly among the most serious skiers in the valley. These were not recreational buyers. They were racers, guides, and locals who skied Baldy every day and had no patience for equipment that couldn't keep up. RD kept up.

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The Models That Defined an Era

Over the course of RD's production life, especially through the 1980s and early 1990s, Brunetto built a lineup that became a collector's obsession decades after the last pair left the garage:

The Coyote was the all-mountain workhorse — powerful, precise, and built for the kind of aggressive all-mountain skiing that Sun Valley demanded. It became the signature RD model of the 1980s and the one most associated with the brand's identity.

The Heli Dog was built for the backcountry and heli-skiing crowd. Wider, more forgiving in deep snow, it carried the "Dog" naming convention that would become a recurring theme in Brunetto's work — a nod, those who knew him say, to his deep affection for Labrador Retrievers, the dogs that were a constant presence in his life.

The Bad Bitch was exactly what the name suggested: a high-performance, uncompromising ski for expert terrain. It was not built for the casual market. It was built for the people who skied the steepest lines on Baldy without hesitation.

The Valdez Extreme pushed the envelope further still — a Super-G and downhill configuration designed for speed and precision at the highest level of the sport.

These were not mass-market products. They were handbuilt instruments, and the people who skied them knew the difference.

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The Ferries Partnership: Peak RD

By the early 1980s, the garage could not contain what RD had become. Brunetto needed marketing and distribution expertise — the part of the business he had no interest in running himself.

He went to Chuck Ferries and Tim Kohl.

Ferries was already a legend in the ski industry. He had founded PRE — the first marketing-driven ski brand, manufactured by K2 — and had purchased Scott USA out of bankruptcy in 1981. He understood how to sell skis at a level few people in the industry matched. Kohl was his business partner in both ventures.

The arrangement was clean: Brunetto made the skis, Ferries and Kohl marketed and distributed them. Within a few years, RD was producing an estimated 25,000 pairs per year — close to a quarter million skis over its lifetime.

That scale is what made the Coyote a household name among serious Western skiers. But for Brunetto, the scale was the beginning of the end.

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The One-Dollar Exit

By the late 1980s, Brunetto and Kohl had ended up with all of RD between them. But the company had become something Brunetto did not recognize.

In his own words to Dick Dorworth: "It ended up not being the company I started out with."

The paradox was brutal: the bigger the company got, the less money Brunetto made. Eventually, he was losing money. He had built RD to build skis — not to manage a company. So he sold his interest in Research Dynamics to Tim Kohl for one dollar — and walked away from the brand he had built from a garage.

Not because he was forced out. Not because the brand failed. Because it stopped being the company he started.

That single dollar is the key to understanding why RD skis matter to collectors. It is not just a vintage ski brand. It is the story of what happens when a craftsman's vision collides with commercial scale, and what a man does when he chooses craft over growth.

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The Scorpian Underground

To understand the environment Mike Brunetto was building in, you have to understand the Warm Springs scene in the early 1980s. Brunetto was a regular presence — his Apache parked outside, skis coming and going.

Nick Gyurkey, a visionary who co-owned with his brother Ed the World Cup Ski Shop at the base of Baldy on the Warm Springs side, drove to Salt Lake City and came back with 10 to 25 pairs of Scorpian short skis — a radical design that was unlike anything else on the mountain at the time. The shop started running Scorpian Tours through the tight, steep pine forests off Baldy, terrain that was effectively off-limits to the long-ski crowd on their 200 to 225 cm planks.

They were heckled in the lift lines. Treated like a sideshow by the traditionalists. But out in the trees, they were skiing a part of the mountain that nobody else could touch. That contrast — ridiculed in the line, untouchable in the trees — is exactly the kind of environment a wildcatter like Brunetto thrived in. He was present in that world. He understood it. And he was building skis for the people who lived in it.

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The Lynx Theory: A Collector's Hunch

What follows is conjecture from LongSkisTruck™ Creative Studio, based on years of collecting and research. It is not documented fact, but a theory that connects a few of the looser threads in this story. It could be 100% wrong. We present it as a hunch — nothing more.

The LongSkisTruck collection contains a pair of Lynx skis — the only pair we have ever encountered in person. They were purchased on eBay years ago. They are a fiberglass-wrapped core, and the overall concept is a close ringer for the Scorpian short ski. The sidewall has cracked and fallen away over the years, which is how the construction is visible.

We know that Mike Brunetto did contract building for other brands, including Lynx, during his career. We know he was present in the Warm Springs scene at the exact moment when Scorpian-style short skis were the most exciting thing happening in that pocket of Sun Valley culture. Putting those facts next to the design of the Lynx ski, it is hard not to see a connection.

Our hunch is this: at some point, Brunetto was pressing a parallel interpretation of the Scorpian concept for the Lynx brand — possibly in the same Ketchum garage ecosystem where the first RD prototypes were being built. Whether he owned Lynx, was a partner, or was a hired builder, we cannot say. The formal records are thin. The brand's eventual disappearance — possibly tied to a trademark conflict with Lynx Golf, as some have speculated — would have barely registered in the larger ski industry. But it may have been a turning point for him.

If you have ever seen another pair of Lynx skis, we want to know about it.

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Wolf Skis: The Return to the Garage

After RD, Brunetto did what wildcatters do. He started over.

Wolf Skis was his return to the garage — a small, focused operation built around the same principles that drove RD in its earliest years. The Black Smoke and Cold Smoke models became cult favorites among the Sun Valley heli-skiing crowd, early back country skis built for deep snow and steep terrain before the rest of the industry caught up to what that meant.

Wolf was not a commercial enterprise in the conventional sense. It was a craftsman's project, built for the people who knew what they were looking for and were willing to seek it out.

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The Legacy

Mike Brunetto passed away on February 25, 2026. He was 86 years old.

The Idaho Mountain Express, which had covered his work and his life for decades, published a tribute March 11, 2026 under the simple heading: Remembering our friend.

That is the right framing. He was not a celebrity. He was not a corporate figure. He was a friend to the people who skied with him, built with him, and understood what he was doing in that garage. He was a man who chose craft over comfort, twice, and never apologized for it.

The Coyote, Heli Dog, Bad Bitch, Valdez Extreme, Black Smoke, and Cold Smoke now sit in collections and archives not just as vintage skis, but as physical evidence of a particular way of thinking about design and risk.

That is the legacy of a wildcatter. You drill, you find something real, and then you move on — because the next hole is always more interesting than the one you already struck.

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References

The following sources informed this tribute and the historical framing presented above:

1. Dick Dorworth, "Mike Brunetto: Still Experimenting," Idaho Mountain Express, December 30, 1998 — archives.mtexpress.com
2. "Mike Brunetto," Idaho Mountain Express Obituaries, March 11, 2026 — mtexpress.com
3. "Research Dynamics — Sun Valley, ID — History?" Teton Gravity Research Forums — forums.tetongravity.com
4. "All Things RD (Research Dynamics)," SkiTalk Forums — skitalk.com
5. "Starting a Ski Company," Flathead Beacon, April 26, 2013 — flatheadbeacon.com
6. RD (Research Dynamics) Brand Snow Skis — LongSkisTruck.com
7. Wolf Brand Snow Skis — LongSkisTruck.com