Earlier this month, the Catskills family ski resort Windham Mountain announced a small name change that heralded big shifts. Going forward, the ski resort will operate as Windham Mountain Club. The transition is part of new ownership’s planned $70 million investment into the mountain’s amenities and services over the next several years. This will expand and enhance a private members’ club, and experiences including a luxury spa, gym, pool, racquet sport facilities, an amphitheater for summer concerts, and an adventure club with fly-fishing, horseback riding, shooting, and biking.
For the past 15 years, Windham’s Board and investor group—including North Castle Partners, Cloverhill Group, and the McGuffog and Starker families—made significant improvements to the mountain. In 2019 they greenlighted the installation of nearly 100 automated, high-efficiency snow guns, replaced over two miles of snowmaking pipe, and purchased a new PistenBully 400 Snowcat. In 2021 Windham Mountain announced additional capital improvements costing $4 million. And, in 2022 over $9 million in capital improvement projects were announced including a brand-new high-speed quad chairlift and upgrades to automated snowmaking.
These investors will remain partners in the ownership of Windham Mountain Club. However, in April, new majority owners were announced. The Beall family and the Kemmons Wilson family, magnates of the hospitality and resort development industries, would be taking over. Charles Kemmons Wilson, the now-deceased patriarch of the Kemmons Wilson family, was best known for founding the Holiday Inn hotel chain in the 1950s. Sandy Beall, the founder of Beall Investment Partners, created the chain restaurant Ruby Tuesday when he was a college student at the University of Tennessee. He also helped grow Blackberry Farm from a nine-bedroom inn in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee into a highly coveted luxury hotel destination.
So Long, Farewell
With the October name change came a visual rebrand and a complete social media overhaul. “Say Goodbye to Windham,” read the ski resort’s website banner when the changes were first announced at the beginning of October. All the Instagram posts published under the previous owners—years of snowfalls, trails, riders, and Catskill Mountains scenery—were deleted and replaced with a new and ritzy aesthetic, including a stylized video of the old sign being replaced. It was clear: Windham was turning the page.
“This was extremely offensive,” says Andrew Steshenko, a semi-professional 18-year-old bicyclist who has been going to Windham every winter and summer for his whole life. It’s where he learned to ski and where he was first introduced to mountain biking.
What most upset Steshenko is the resort's plan to permanently close the Windham Mountain Bike Park, a haven for mountain biking enthusiasts, at the end of the season.
“It was the real mountain biker's favorite bike park,” says Steshenko. The park held the prestigious UCI Mountain Bike World Cup on multiple occasions, and opened to the public in 2015 with world class trails created by Gravity Logic, a team of renowned trail designers.
Windham has not yet made a public announcement of the park’s closing. Chip Seamans, the President of Windham Mountain Club, told Chronogram that the park will indeed be closing.
“The bike business wasn’t our core market,” says Seamans. He speaks matter of factly in a deep voice. In the future, Seamans says Windham will host some sort of mountain biking, but ultimately the ski resort would need more money to advance the business. But Steshenko says the 2023 season was the busiest he’s ever seen. “I can attest to that,” he says. “I was there almost every weekend.”
Members of the Windham community were furious. Not just about the end of a mountain biking era. Many felt that the rebrand was an active erasure of Windham’s history, and along with it what made Windham special to so many for over 70 years: cheap tickets, wholesome family-friendly fun, and a deep connection with local communities.
“It feels very elitist to me,” says Brooke Kalman, a social worker and photographer who grew up going to Windham. “Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the whole way they went about announcing on Instagram doesn't really leave a good taste for anybody. It’s a slap in the face to people."
Catskill Alps
Going forward, Windham Mountain Club promises an “elevated,” general food court and a Mediterranean kitchen concept called Seasons will be located in the lodge. WMC will also provide luxury dining with an onsite Italian Alps-style restaurant called Cin! Cin! “The thing is,” Kalman says. “Windham isn’t in the Alps.”
For Kalman and others in the Windham community, the shift is bittersweet. It signals Windham’s official entrance into an omnipresent trend for the ever trendy Catskills, where historic homes and curated getaway experiences become a chic background to entice wealthy people away from the tumult of the city. This leaves many locals wondering: what about us?
Recently, Windham Mountain Club walked back their “Say Goodbye to Windham” messaging and replaced it with a new website homepage that reads: “Say Hello To An Elevated Winter Experience in the Catskill Mountains,” in what appears to be Dutch 811 font. Very European.
“I understand people were hurt by some of the marketing we did,” Seamans says. “This showed us what we knew, that people feel deeply that Windham is their home. We truly value this, and we may not have shown that. We intend to prove otherwise and to build on our foundation.”
Seamans started his career in 1987 as a ski patroller at Sunday River, a ski resort in Maine. He became President and General Manager at Windham Mountain in 2011. In April, the mountain secured new investment from the Beall family and Kemmons Wilkson family, ushering in a new chapter of ownership for the mountain which first started in the late 1950’s as Cave Mountain.
Seamans has seen the mountain evolve through various owners. "At our core, we want to continue to be a family-friendly mountain open to all," he emphasizes. This is a marked change in tone from the initial marketing strategy, which proudly branded the future of Windham as a partially “exclusive mountain community.”
Push back against lift tickets may have also led to the dynamic pricing model WMC will implement going forward. Lift tickets will run between $70 and $150. Winter season passes start at $699 and go to $1,899, with day passes averaging around $95. The resort’s new focus on high price and exclusive private memberships includes a one-time initiation fee of $175,000 for a ‘Residential Membership.’
Windham has always branded itself as a less-crowded alternative to Hunter Mountain. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Windham allowed roughly 8,000 people per day, according to Seamans. During the pandemic, this number was reduced to 5,000. And, last year, Windham decided to cap attendance at 4,500 people.
It is clear that the wholesome and quaint Windham Mountain, a place where generations of families enjoyed low costs, is aiming to cater, at least in part, to a new crowd—those familiar with private clubs at mountains like Zermatt and Aspen. Still, Windham Mountain Club plans to provide free season passes for every student in the local school district, Windham Ashland Jewett Central School.
The unveiling of Windham Mountain Club has ignited a conversation about the delicate balance between preserving tradition and embracing the future. "I can kind of recognize that any resistance I'd be having is kind of selfish nostalgia, right?" Kalman muses, her words encapsulating the mixed feelings many locals harbor. "But with the rebrand of the mountain, I think it's going to take away business from locals."
Seamans doesn’t think so. One of his goals is to incentivize longer-term stays in Windham over day trips to help local business. Yet, finding ways to send skiers and snowboarders away from Windham's new dining experiences and toward local restaurants might be difficult.
For now, members of the Windham community upset by the rebranding are finding comedic solace in a meme account on Instagram called @windumb_mtn. The facilitator of that account, who wishes to remain anonymous, says she has been going to Windham since she was small.
“Not only do I doubt that there is really a market for such ultra luxury at a ski area of Windham's size and quality, but also it's likely to drive away less affluent skiers who have loved it for years. This is troubling because it makes skiing—an already exclusive sport by its nature—far more exclusive and out of reach of middle-income families and area locals.”
