Opinion | Gulmarg Without Snow: How a Winter Resort Learned to Sell Summer

For most of its modern tourism history, Gulmarg has been sold as a winter product. Skiing, the gondola, powder runs down Apharwat, that’s the version of Gulmarg that shows up in travel brochures and Instagram reels, the one that draws foreign skiers alongside domestic tourists chasing their first sight of snow. But walk through Gulmarg in June, once the slopes have gone green and the ski huts have been boarded up for the season, and you find a town that has quietly built a second identity for itself, one that gets far less attention but increasingly matters just as much to the local economy.

Summer in Gulmarg is golf, mostly. The Gulmarg Golf Club, sitting at close to 2,650 metres, markets itself as one of the highest golf courses in the world, and it draws a specific kind of tourist, older, often affluent, willing to pay premium green fees for the novelty of playing at altitude with the Pir Panjal range as backdrop. It’s a narrower market than the ski crowd, but a steady one, and hotel owners in Gulmarg have learned to structure their summer bookings around it.

Beyond golf, the gondola itself keeps running through summer, ferrying tourists up to Kongdoori and, on clear days, up to the second phase toward Apharwat, where patches of snow can survive well into July at the higher elevation. For a tourist who has never seen snow, the chance to stand in it during peak Indian summer, with temperatures in the plains crossing 40 degrees, has genuine pull. Families travel to Gulmarg specifically for that contrast, leaving Delhi or Lucknow heat and arriving somewhere they need a jacket.

What summer footfall lacks, compared to the ski season, is the specialist infrastructure that winter tourism built up over two decades. Gulmarg has become genuinely sophisticated as a ski destination, instructor networks, equipment rental chains, avalanche safety awareness that didn’t exist fifteen years ago. Summer tourism runs on a much simpler model: hotel stay, gondola ride, maybe a pony trek to Khilanmarg meadow, maybe a day trip further out. It’s less specialized, but it’s also more accessible to a broader range of visitors, including families with young children who would never consider a ski holiday.

Local traders describe summer as steadier but less lucrative per visitor than winter. Ski season brings tourists willing to spend heavily on equipment, instruction, and premium accommodation clustered around a compressed window of good snow. Summer spreads more thinly across a longer season but with lower average spend per visitor, more day-trippers, fewer multi-night stays, less willingness to pay Gulmarg’s higher hotel rates when Srinagar is a manageable drive away.

The meadow itself — Gulmarg means “meadow of flowers” in the literal translation, and in summer it earns the name. Wildflowers spread across the slopes that carry skiers in January, and the contrast between the two seasons is genuinely dramatic if you’ve seen both. Locals who work the gondola or run pony stands often do both jobs across the year, adjusting to whichever season is active, which gives Gulmarg’s workforce a kind of seasonal fluency that took years to develop.

Environmental pressure is a growing concern here too, though it gets less coverage than Dal Lake’s troubles. Construction in Gulmarg has expanded faster than the town’s waste and water infrastructure, and locals have flagged concerns about the meadow’s ecology being squeezed by ever-larger hotel footprints. The Jammu and Kashmir government has periodically floated restrictions on new construction in the area, citing its ecologically sensitive status, but enforcement has been inconsistent, and hotel construction has continued in phases even when moratoriums were technically in place.

There’s also a quieter competitive dynamic at play. Gulmarg used to be the automatic answer to “where should I go in Kashmir,” but Pahalgam and, increasingly, offbeat destinations like Doodhpathri have chipped away at that default status. Some of this is simple market maturation, as more tourists visit Kashmir repeatedly, they look for variety rather than repeating the same three-town circuit every trip. Gulmarg’s response has been to lean harder into what only it can offer: the gondola, the golf course, the genuine high-altitude experience that Pahalgam, sitting lower and softer, doesn’t quite match.

The road up to Gulmarg from Tangmarg remains a bottleneck during peak periods, particularly on weekends when day-trippers from Srinagar add to the regular tourist traffic. Traffic management here has improved somewhat with better signage and staggered gondola ticketing, but anyone who has sat in a queue of cars inching up the final stretch during a July weekend knows the system still strains under pressure.

What’s clear, talking to people who’ve worked in Gulmarg’s tourism economy across both seasons, is that the town no longer thinks of itself as purely a winter destination that happens to also see some summer visitors. Summer has become a real, planned-for part of the business, not as lucrative as ski season at its peak, but reliable, and increasingly central to how Gulmarg survives the months when there’s no snow left to sell.

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