Powder Ridge Mountain Park & Resort

There’s Almost Never Powder at Powder Ridge
Powder Ridge Mountain Park & Resort, Middlefield
January 2025

As I write this, Connecticut has a whopping four ski resorts. Mountains. Hills. When it comes to the actual skiing, Powder Ridge is one of the weaker two. But this place makes up for that with a billion other things.

Connecticut hikers are familiar with Powder Ridge because it is located on Beseck Mountain, and the Mattabesett Trail traverses the entire length Beseck Mountain. In fact, when I was here to snowboard, I cared as much to find the trail behind the lifts as I did about boarding down the ski runs.

Powder Ridge has had a rather interesting history to be sure. It opened as Powder Hill (which is accurate) in 1961, and top-to-bottom skiing started during the 1962 winter season. Chairlifts were added in the 1960s and this place was pretty darn popular during that decade – here’s a crazy stat: for a while in the 1970’s, it had the only four-person chair lift in all of New England. Then there was the infamous three-day rock festival that was to be Woodstock 2, but was canceled by local officials five days before it was to start.

The planners of the festival skipped town with the money, but thousands of young adults showed up at the ski area anyway and were treated to one artist: Melanie. It was a mess and certainly the biggest thing that has ever happened in Middlefield.

The decades of ownership here was also a mess. In fact, Powder Ridge was closed from 2007 to 2014 and a whole slew of owners, near-owners, and bankruptcies plagued the place. It was finally bought and is currently owned as I write this in 2026 by Brownstone Exploration & Discovery Park (which is a super cool place in Portland). They got it for a song after several entities balked at higher prices previously.

They cleaned it up, invested a couple million in the facilities and amenities and here we are. With 19 named trails, not all of them with snowmaking, not all of them lit up for night skiing, and none of them expert/black diamond rated. The vertical drop is 417 feet from the summit at an elevation of 800 feet.

So, yeah. This isn’t exactly Killington. But it doesn’t pretend to be and it includes facilities for freestyle skiing, snowtubing, and snowbiking and has cute little rails, jumps, and a full size half-pipe at the end of the terrain park run which is called Shredwood Forest which is rad. There is a very nice restaurant here as well. Oh, and during the summer they keep it going with disc golf, mountain biking, tubing, zip-lining, paint balling and synthetic skiing/snowboarding which I’ve never seen in action. It doesn’t look great.

Since this joint is small and local, and somehow has a bunch of lifts, there are never long lines or anything. Calvin and I boarded pretty much every trail we could from the top. We happened to hit Powder Ridge on a very icy day, at least by mid-afternoon when the sun angle changed a bit and everything glazed over. I couldn’t handle it, as my board’s edge was nearly non-existent.

Calvin rode and rode, seemingly unbothered by the ice – though he did concentrate on the less affected terrain park stuff.

Powder Ridge is a great little beginner ski hill. Especially for families because the Fire at the Ridge restaurant is very welcoming and infinitely better (and more expensive) than the usual low quality Connecticut ski place cafeteria. They’ve made the best out of what they have, and I respect that.

Powder Ridge Mountain Park & Resort
CTMQ’s Sports & Sporting Events