In the summer of 2022, a company called Resorts of the Northwoods announced it was under contract to buy the shuttered 496-acre Telemark Golf Course outside Cable and turn it into a $193 million resort and residential community. Two hotels. Rental villas. Condos. Workforce housing. A free-standing pub with regional cuisine from local and national chefs. The plan had a closing date, a chairman quoted in the Wisconsin State Journal, and the kind of ambition that gets picked up by outlets across the state.

Four years later, if you drive that stretch of Telemark Road looking for the pub or the 250-room lodge, you will not find them. What you will find instead is a much smaller, much quieter project that has sold out every lot it has offered, and that story tells you more about where Cable's real estate demand is actually concentrated than the $193 million headline ever did.

Two projects, one property

It is easy to conflate these because they sit on the same acreage and share the same backstory. Here is the difference.

Resorts of the Northwoods, led by chairman Jim Kelley and president James Bolen, planned to close on the golf course property on August 31, 2022, with a separate closing on an adjoining Clear Lake tract that October. Kelley told reporters the group had spent two years studying the project and framed it as a housing solution for a region that badly needed it. By January 2024, a Wisconsin Public Radio piece quoted Town of Cable supervisor Jack Radecki as still speaking about the project in hypothetical terms.

"People want to walk cautiously to make sure it's done right and can exist on its own."

That caution reads differently in hindsight. No subsequent announcement, groundbreaking, or construction update has surfaced since. It would not be the first time a Telemark redevelopment stalled. A 2017 proposal from Florida-based HK Hospitality to invest roughly $47 million fell apart over what the company called environmental and title concerns, and an earlier $41 million plan from 2020 never materialized either.

Meanwhile, on a separate slice of that same former golf course, something did get built. It is called Telemark Hills, and it is not a hotel complex.

The project that actually sold

Telemark Hills is a homesite subdivision developed by Fred Scheer, a lifelong Hayward resident with 33 Birkies skied, in partnership with the American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation. There is no golf course anymore. There is no hotel. There is no lake frontage on any of these parcels. What there is, is direct trail access into the Mt. Telemark Village network, and that access alone has been enough to move every lot the developer has released.

Phase 1 sold out within days of being offered in mid-2024 and closed in early 2025. Phase 2, twenty lots, moved fifteen of them under contract with closings on pace for early 2026 pending zoning approvals. A third phase of roughly ten lots was slated to reach the market in mid-2026. One lot from that pipeline, a 2.35-acre parcel numbered Lot 40, went to auction in September 2025 with a minimum bid of $74,900 and closing anticipated in early 2026. No dock. No water view. Just proximity to a trail system that most Cable buyers ten years ago would have driven past without a second look.

Why this is happening on land with no water

The American Birkebeiner Ski Foundation's executive director, Ben Popp, has watched the user base at Mt. Telemark Village shift in real time. The trails used to belong strictly to competitive Nordic skiers in racing gear. Popp has said the newer crowd looks different.

"More people out here now are walking their dog with a flannel shirt."

That shift matters for land value because it changes who considers a landlocked wooded lot desirable. A trail system built for competitive Nordic skiers is a narrow amenity. A trail system built for dog walkers, casual mountain bikers, and families on a paved loop is a broad one, and broad amenities support land prices the way lake frontage does, just through a different mechanism.

The evidence is already showing up in how active Cable listings describe themselves. Recent listing language circulating for property near the Village includes phrases like these, pulled directly from current marketing copy:

• Wooded homesites marketed by their distance to the trailhead, roughly a mile from downtown Cable and about three and a half miles from Mt. Telemark Village
• A parcel in the subdivision itself described as a "highly sought after lot in newly developed Telemark Hills near Cable"
• New construction in the nearby Wilde River Subdivision marketed by its nearness to the Birkebeiner ski trails, the CAMBA mountain bike network, and Lake Namakagon, in that order

Notice that even listings with lake access nearby lead with trail proximity first. That ordering is not an accident. It is a signal of what buyers are searching for.

What this means if you are comparing Cable to other towns

Cross-referencing active lake-specific listings in Cable as of late July 2026 showed an average asking price above $1.2 million, with the least expensive waterfront parcel listed around $225,000 and the most expensive near $3.85 million. That is the number most out-of-area buyers see first, and it can make Cable look like a strictly high-entry-point market.

Telemark Hills lots priced in the mid-$70,000s and up complicate that picture. They represent a real entry point into the same broader market, built on a different value driver: trail access rather than shoreline. If you are evaluating land in Cable and it does not touch water, the question worth asking is not whether it is close to a lake. It is how close it sits to the CAMBA trail cluster and the Mt. Telemark Village hub, because that proximity is functioning as its own amenity category now, one recognized well beyond the local market. In June 2026, Mt. Telemark Village earned the Destination of the Year award at the second annual Governor's Outdoor Industry Awards, presented by Governor Tony Evers alongside Tourism Secretary Anne Sayers, a statewide acknowledgment of exactly the kind of draw that is pulling buyers to land with no water in sight.

The bigger lesson sits underneath both projects. When you read about a splashy dollar figure attached to a Northwoods redevelopment, treat it as a proposal until you find evidence of contracts closing and construction underway. The number that actually predicts where values move is rarely the biggest one in the press release. In Cable's case, it was fifteen lots quietly going under contract while the $193 million story sat frozen in a 2022 headline.

A few questions worth asking early

Is the $193 million Resorts of the Northwoods project still happening? There is no public confirmation that it has broken ground since the 2022 announcement. Buyers should treat it as an unrealized proposal rather than a factor currently affecting comparable values.

Can I still buy a lot in Telemark Hills? Phase 3, roughly ten lots, was expected to reach the market in mid-2026. Availability changes quickly given how fast the earlier phases sold, so timing matters more here than in most land purchases.

Do these homesites have any lake access? No. Their value is built entirely around proximity to the Mt. Telemark Village trail network rather than water frontage, which is worth understanding before comparing their price per acre to a lakefront parcel.

If you are trying to figure out what a piece of land near Cable is actually worth right now, water frontage is only half the conversation. The other half is happening on a trail map. McKinney Realty has been tracking both sides of that story for buyers weighing Cable against the rest of the Northwoods corridor. View Properties to see what is currently available near the Village and along the shoreline, and let's talk through which kind of land actually fits what you are looking for.