Storm Skiing 10/2/2026: Mount Southington GM Jay Dougherty on Lift Upgrades, Snow Pass, & More

WhoJay Dougherty, President and General Manager of Mount Southington, ConnecticutDate RecordedOct. 2, 2026About Mount SouthingtonOwned by: Multiple shareholders descended from the ski area’s foundersYear founded: 1964Pass affiliations:* Snow Pass – 2 days, no blackouts* Snow Triple Play – up to 2 days, no blackoutsThese two passes have a lot of overlap, but completely different rosters:Base elevation: 210 feetSummit elevation: 571 feetVertical drop: 361 feetSkiable acres: 51 acresAverage annual snowfall: 40 inchesLift count: 8 (1 triple, 3 doubles, 4 carpets) – view Lift Blog’s inventory of Mount Southington’s lift fleetWhy I interviewed himA lot of ski areas are beautiful because they’re set within nature’s masterpieces. Mount Southington is beautiful because it’s not: How cool is that? A ski area in the middle of a neighborhood. A neighborhood that most of us could probably afford to live in. Kids grow up across the street. If it snows enough, they can probably ski from their front door to the lifts. Good thing the ski hill is already there. We rarely build cool things next to where we actually live anymore. But it’s hard to get rid of a ski area once it’s built, unless it fails. Southington [Suh-thing-ton] is not going anywhere. Three of the bump’s chairlifts are under 20 years old (two are younger than five), and a replacement for the fourth - Stardust - starts, well, any second now (a new top terminal is sitting in the parking lot). A few dozen neighborhood ski areas like this still exist across America, mostly east of the Mississippi. Sometimes the neighbors hate them, especially during all-night snowmaking season. But very few people living in a house near a ski area today would have been surprised to find themselves living near a ski area, since the facility would have in most cases preceded them. Maybe a few even moved in to be close to skiing. It’s cool to imagine being one of them, waking up to morning turns three months per year. How cool - like having a lake house on a kinda small lake. It’s not Aspen, but most of us aren’t billionaires, and it’s nice to think that, in a few far-flung corners of America, there’s a backdoor to that sort of life that no one’s really checking.Additional resources* New England Ski History details Mount Southington’s early days.* A bit more on Southington’s Northstar lift, received second-hand from Craigmeur, New Jersey, migrating for its third life as Lost Valley, Maine’s Chair 3.* Somehow all my Mount Southington photos have vanished into the digital void, but Instapost preserves this shot of a really awesome sunset from my 2021 visit. Top of the Stardust chair:TranscriptsThere are two transcripts. Both are generated by robots. Both are helpful and defective in their own unique ways. I do not proofread either of them.Transcript 1: Click the “transcript” button at the top of this article. You can only see this transcript on a computer. Because I don’t know why exactly but everything is getting better and dumber all at once it seems. Anyway, this is the transcript that the robots create when I upload the podcast to the internet. The cool thing about it is that you can click on any block of text and the audio will teleport there instantly. The uncool thing about this transcript is that it does not indicate who is talking at any given moment.Transcript 2: You can read this below. This is the transcript that Zoom creates as we record the podcast. The cool thing about this transcript is that it indicates who is talking at any given moment. The uncool thing about this transcript is that the timestamps do not match the audio. Also, you cannot click on this text to move to the associated point in the audio.ZoomStuart Winchester: My guest today has been president and general manager of Mount Southington, Connecticut since 2014.00:03:20.000 --> 00:03:37.000Stuart Winchester: Established in 1964, Mount Southington offers 51 acres of skiable terrain served by four chairlifts and several surface lifts. Jay Doherty is my