Pinegrove Ranch being bought, reopened
Will reopen in April as Pine Ridge Dude Ranch; majority of former employees expected to return
KERHONKSON, N.Y. » The shuttered Pinegrove Ranch and Family Resort will be reborn this spring as the Pine Ridge Dude Ranch, one of the prospective buyers said Friday.
Mike Offner, who was the barn manager at the Pinegrove before the business closed in September 2017, said he and two investors who are backing him expect to close on the purchase Monday.
Offner would not identity the investors, other than to say they are local business owners. He also would not divulge the purchase price.
An attorney for a previous prospective buyer said the asking price was $2.5 million but that he didn’t expect it sell for that much.
Offner and his backers will buy the property, which is at 30 Cherrytown Road in Kerhonkson, from Sterling National Bank.
“I worked at Pinegrove since I was 16 years old, and my partners ... have been going to the ranch for over 30 years as customers,” Offner said. “So we’re all passionate about it.”
The Pinegrove Ranch and Family Resort closed four months after its owner, David O’Halloran, died while on vacation in the Bahamas.
Offner said a “soft opening” of the Pine Ridge Dude Ranch is planned for April and that a majority of the Pinegrove’s 80 full-time and seasonal employees will return.
He also said the new business will have 16 of the 34 horses that previously were stabled there.
Offner said in October that he and a friend bought 14 of Pinegrove’s horses when the animals were put up for auction after the business closed, and that friends and former resort customers bought all but four of the remaining horses.
Offner said Friday that the horse auction at first seemed like a “low point” because of the possibility of “the whole herd getting split up.”
“But it turned into a high moment,” he said, “because it brought everybody together, and we accomplished the goal we set out to do, and that was to save them all. Whether it was them retiring or being put out in the field, we didn’t want them to go anywhere they shouldn’t have gone.”
Offner said his effort to buy the Pinegrove started three months before it closed — “I approached [investors] back in June” — but that he “didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel until ... around a month ago.”
Offner said the Pine Ridge Dude Ranch will have the same attractions as its predecessor but also give guests a wide reach into the region.
“We want to really plug into the local community,” he said. “We’re going to be doing wine tours and distillery tours. We’re going to be taking people to stay over at the casino [in Sullivan County], the ski mountains, over to Bethel Woods. There are so many great places in the area that we want our guests to be able to experience.”
The Pinegrove had 126 guest rooms when it shut down.