At ₹1.5 lakh, you may get to attend a secret ski party in Gulmarg

For most Indian travellers, ski season usually arrives filtered through Europe—destinations like Gstaad, St Moritz, and Courchevel, which come pre-packaged with glamorous après-ski scenes, indulgent spas, and a certain social choreography that lingers from ski lift to hot tub. It’s certainly fun but predictable. Gulmarg, by contrast, feels like an outlier. Wild, expansive, and largely uninterested in performing for an audience. And it’s precisely this quality that makes it the setting for the Secret Ski Party, an invite-only winter gathering that has quietly taken shape on Gulmarg’s slopes over the last year.

Held across multiple editions between January and March, Secret Ski Party brings small groups together, usually no more than 30 to 40 people at a time, in the snowy hill station for four nights and five days of skiing, shared meals, and loosely structured time together. There’s no public schedule splashed across Instagram, no mass ticketing, and no attempt to scale the experience beyond what the landscape and group dynamics can comfortably hold. The name itself signals restraint rather than spectacle. “When I called it the Secret Ski Party, it wasn’t theatre. It was a practical filter,” says founder Krishan Anand. “The word ‘secret’ protects intimacy; it signals that the gathering is for presence and genuine human exchange.”

That thinking shapes everything from how guests arrive to how the days unfold. Invitations are largely referral-led, passed through alumni networks and personal circles. There is an option to request access online, but even that process feels deliberately opaque. The aim isn’t exclusivity for its own sake but a shared willingness to show up without performance.

Accommodation follows the same philosophy. Guests stay together in a shared chalet rather than dispersed across a large resort. It’s a choice that collapses distance—between rooms, people, moments. Mornings and evenings blur into one another. Gloves are borrowed. Ski runs are compared over tea. Conversations stretch late without announcement. 

Skiing anchors the days, but expertise isn’t a prerequisite. Private instructors and ski sherpas personalise the experience for each guest, whether it’s their first encounter with snow or a confident descent from Apharwat. Skiing becomes both the reason everyone is here and the excuse to linger. 

Certain rituals repeat in each edition—guided slope days, a traditional Wazwan dinner served in customary seating style, Sufi-music evenings, narrative-led table meals—while large pockets of time remain intentionally unprogrammed. Anand describes it as a loose choreography rather than a fixed itinerary: guests are given the shape of the experience, not the timestamps. 

Food, too, follows this unforced rhythm. Rather than headline dining moments, meals are designed to feel embedded in the landscape. One afternoon might stretch into a long lunch by INJA, staged at what’s described as the highest dining table in the Himalayas. For Panchali Mahendra, CEO of Atelier House Hospitality, which made its debut in India with the restaurant in early 2023, the draw was less about spectacle and more about context. “We’re always interested in pushing boundaries—not just in flavour but in where and how food is experienced,” she says. Cooking in Gulmarg, she explains, shifts the focus away from replication and towards reimagining what dining can feel like when the location leads the narrative. 

Afternoons deliberately slow down. Some guests retreat for rest or quiet walks along the ridgelines, while others opt for wellness sessions led by Utsaah, The Wellness Sanctuary. These aren’t framed as recovery from skiing so much as a counterbalance to it. Founder Kritika Makker Kapoor describes the sessions as “a pause between pulses”—time to regulate the nervous system and integrate physical exertion with mental stillness. “Stillness isn’t the opposite of movement,” she says. “It’s what gives movement meaning.”

As daylight fades, the group gathers again, often for a Valley of Love sundowner, where wide-open views and restrained pours replace the usual après-ski theatrics. There’s no DJ till dawn, no engineered party arc. Bars are curated with the same intentionality as the rest of the experience, shaped by collaborators like Mr Button Residence and ZLB23. The emphasis is less on novelty and more on mood. “What resonated for us was the idea of intentional intimacy,” says Kripal Singh of ZLB23. In Gulmarg’s cold weather, that translates into drinks designed for warmth and conversations rather than excess. Live Sufi music often fills the room. Coffee, matcha, and hot chocolate are treated with as much care as cocktails. The word that comes up repeatedly, among organisers and guests alike, is mahol: a feeling that settles in slowly, shaped as much by silence as by sound.

The cohort itself tends to be eclectic but cohesive—entrepreneurs, cultural operators, artists, founders, and creators who are comfortable with unhurried conversation. You might find a startup founder, a retired ski legend, and a political thinker swapping vinyl records instead of business cards. Local musicians, handcrafted Kashmiri tableware, and regionally rooted food appear not as curated add-ons but as everyday expressions of place. Add to this the snowmobiles, and you have the perfect setup to engage with the mountains.

Secret Ski Party arrives at a moment when Indian travel culture is shifting away from checklist luxury and towards experiences that value presence. It doesn’t announce itself loudly or sell aspiration. Instead, it exists as a small, recurring winter gathering that lets the mountains set the tone. What guests carry back isn’t a gallery of engineered images or the residue of overdone après, but something quieter: a recalibration of time, place, and people, without the pressure to perform or be seen.

Duration: Four nights, five days

When: Multiple editions between January and March

Cost: Packages start at ₹1.5 lakh per person (twin sharing), including stay, meals, ski lessons, guided experiences, and curated gatherings

Getting there: Fly into Srinagar; transfers to Gulmarg are arranged from there

Invites: Referral-led. Requests can also be made via the Secret Ski Party website or Instagram