How Powder Ridge has brought the ‘snow factory’ to Connecticut

Powder Ridge in Connecticut has found a way to keep skiers on the slopers at its southern New England location.

Winter managed to rebound from its midseason thaw, just in time. Last month was one of the snowiest Januarys in Vermont in a decade, a remarkable accomplishment considering the soggy doldrums of the holiday stretch. As January came to a close, northern New England ski areas such as Saddleback, Bretton Woods and Pats Peak were skiing and riding on 100 percent of their terrain.

Meanwhile, in the majority of southern New England, winter was but a hazy shade, where nor’easters were more apt to deposit rain and sleet before snow. Try running a ski area in that.

Sean Hayes has for more than a decade. The Connecticut native purchased Powder Ridge ski area in 2012, when it had been closed for nearly eight years prior, with the intention of turning the property into a 12-month business, offering a variety of activities in addition to those that require snow. Located in Middlefield, Conn., Powder Ridge Mountain Park and Resort is the southernmost ski area in all of New England.

So, when the likes of far-north locales such as Jay Peak and Sugarloaf are having droughts of snow, imagine what it’s like 30 miles south of Hartford.

“We’re just on the south side of (Interstate) 84 that diagonally crosses Connecticut,” Hayes said, “which is basically the snow line where if it snows, it snows north.”

Oddly enough, Powder Ridge’s best asset has been its location. Only 100 miles from Manhattan and 120 from Boston, the ski area sits smack-dab in a radius of 23 million people. “But our biggest detriment is where we are close to that shoreline warm weather,” Hayes said. “We don’t get that snow. We don’t even get the temperatures.”

Hayes noted the challenges other Connecticut ski areas face, sitting around 25 degrees to make snow every night. It’s even more of a chore at Powder Ridge, which normally will see temperatures a few degrees higher with higher humidity, a difficult combination for snowmaking.

Podcast: The secrets of Powder Ridge

Now, during the 10th season of Hayes’ ownership, Powder Ridge feels as if it has leveled the playing field somewhat with the addition of the $1.5 million DeMaclenko Snow Pro, a system that boasts it can cover a football field with six inches of snow over the course of 24 hours. Hayes went to snowmaking leader DeMaclenko, which had just partnered with KTI, the largest temperature-independent manufacturer of snow guns in the world, looking for a solution and came back with what he’s calling the “snow factory.”

“It’s a fully contained refrigeration unit so we can make snow at any temperatures, in theory,” Hayes said.

According to the manufacturer, its turnkey systems are permanently installed in containers and are available in various sizes and different maximum daily outputs. They can be run using different refrigerants and are delivered ready to use. Regardless of climatic conditions, DeMaclenko promises the ability to make snow year-round, even in the high heat and humidity of a Nutmeg State summer. Just don’t expect the lifts to be running for the Fourth of July.

“Our philosophy was we’re not going to make snow in the middle of the summer. But we can start making snow next October 1, October 15, and leave it in piles. We can now guarantee our customers we will open for skiing, boarding, and tubing on Black Friday every year.”

“This system takes this facility over the hump,” Hayes said. “It makes it profitable. You’re adding an entire month. We’re talking about a ski area in Connecticut. We’re lucky to get January, February and maybe 15 days in March. That’s our season. So if I add all of December, I’ve increased my market share by a third.”

The holiday season provides untapped potential for Powder Ridge.

“Our community wants to come together on a mountain that has skiing during the holidays, those weekends in December, building up, bringing family in,” Hayes said. “So we wrapped an entire winter festival around having guaranteed new snow every weekend in December. And it was very, very successful. … Having that December, it involves everyone in the family now for an entire additional month. So to us, the economics were night and day. We tried previously synthetic skiing, synthetic snow, and it’s just not the same. So this is real snow, no chemicals added, that you are skiing guaranteed in November.”

The “snow factory” didn’t arrive on site until Nov. 12 this season, so the Black Friday guarantee will have to wait another year. But the system’s power was put on immediate display, with Powder Ridge being able to open its tubing attraction within a matter of days.

“I know this year we got a late start, but even in December we were hitting over 1,100 customers a day because of that snow factory,” Hayes said. “So it far exceeded our first-year estimates. It’s more than just skiing and boarding. It’s bringing the whole family together, grandma, grandpa and everyone else. Come for dinner, go tubing, have cocktails. We had an ice bar. We brought in a giant igloo. So we had the ice bar out there, live entertainment every Saturday night. If we do that, we believe, we can create a business model that gets us over a hundred thousand visits in December alone. So it doubles what normally this kind of resort would do over the winter season in December. That’s night and day difference.”

While Hayes said that 70 percent of those guests might choose other activities like tubing, dining or shopping over skiing (“It’s not a huge push on skiing, it’s about those winter activities as a whole,” Hayes said), he still understands Powder Ridge’s responsibility as a feeder hill. “That’s what we are,” he said. “We don’t want to compete with the northern ski areas. They’re our complement. We want our customers going to destination resorts after we teach them how (to ski).”

Hayes said he believes that more than 70 percent of all ski resorts will have a system similar to Powder Ridge’s within the next five years. “I don’t think they’re going to have a choice,” he said. “I’m not going to get into the political aspect of global warming and all that, but you know, the weather pattern is changing. There’s no doubt about it.”

Hayes said he thinks it critical for local ski areas to make it what he called “easy fun,” an economical attraction that a family of five can enjoy at a reasonable price point and, more importantly, want to return.

“We’ve done some things wrong in our 10-year history and overpromised and underdelivered initially, but we are there now. They’ve given us a second chance, so the community, I think, has gotten their mountain back.”