Snowtubing + Snowmobiles at Windham Mountain Adventure Park
Looking for some fun winter activities for kids in the Catskills? Windham Mountain Adventure Park is the perfect spot, whether or not your kids are ready to ski. The 650-foot snow-covered snow-tubing hill welcomes all visitors without height or age limits — riders just have to be tall enough to sit up in a tube by themselves. We took lots of photos to help you see it for yourself and gauge whether or not your kids will be up for this adventure.
On an unseasonably warm December Saturday between Christmas and New Year’s, Windham Mountain Adventure Park was CROWDED. The parking lot was packed, and the ticket line was very long. (If you’ve got 2 adults available, somebody can wait inside the lodge with the kids.) And then there was another line for the snowtubes, but it moved pretty quickly since the hill has about 10 lanes. Plus, many tubers choose to be grouped together, which keeps the line moving fast.
Note: Only one rider per tube is allowed. You can’t put your kid on your lap, but you can link tubes together by holding onto the strings attached to your partner’s tube. There were definitely some scrappy little toddlers enjoying the ride, though I don’t think our indoorsy, risk-adverse city kids would’ve gotten in a tube by themselves before age 5. (Also worth noting: Some kids were wearing ski helmets, which seemed like a smart idea.)
A Windham employee gets you safely into your tube and then asks if you’d like to spin or go straight down the hill, before hurling you down the mountain. It doesn’t look terribly steep, but it feels like a nice, long, fast, and wild ride. Here’s our 5-year-old after her first snowtube ride down the hill:
SO MUCH FUN! And you don’t even have to walk back up the hill because there’s an easy conveyor lift that gently carries you back up. My kids had no trouble standing on it.
But wait, there’s more! Mini-snowmobiles are also available for kids aged 6 and up who weigh less than 120 pounds. It’s a short, circular course, and you can see your kids loop around and around. It’s totally appropriate for kids as young as 6 years old. I was a little nervous about our 8-year-old city kid who doesn’t have much experience riding a bike, but he loved it!
Plus, it’s worth nothing that everyone who worked at Windham was so kind to us. I started thinking about how much fun it would be to be an outdoorsy teenager or college kid in this corner of the Catskills, working winter weekends at Windham and summers at the Zoom Flume. (That said, it was around 45 degrees on the day we visited, and I suppose weather conditions aren’t always so pleasant!)
A 2-hour snowtubing session plus 15 minutes on the snowmobiles was plenty for our 5-year-old and 8-year-old. (2 hours of snowtubing costs $20 per person, plus we paid $10 for the snowmobile ride.) The kids were mellowed out by the time we made it back to the lodge for hot pretzels and mozzarella sticks. But if you’ve got more energy than we did, there’s also a 120′ x 60′ outdoor skating rink, with skate rentals available.
The New York winter can be a struggle with little kids, but man, this place is really fun! We highly recommend taking kids aged 5 and up, and we think our teenage cousins would like it just as much as we did. If you’re new to the area, here are a few more of our favorite spots around Windham, and definitely don’t miss the breakfast sandwich at Windham Local!
Windham Mountain Adventure Park is located at 19 Resort Drive, Windham, NY; 1-800-754-9463. The park is open mid-December through early March. See their website for hours of operation.
