Skaneateles WinterFest Runs on Three Volunteer Groups, Not One Committee

Friday night, 7 p.m., Clift Park. A crowd stands in the cold watching Stan Kolonko crouch beside a chimney of ice, six feet eight inches tall, that he spent the last two hours carving, blowtorch in hand. He lights it. The chimney glows pink, then roars, then collapses into black smoke within fifteen minutes. This is the Ice Burn, the traditional kickoff to Skaneateles WinterFest, and by the time the crowd disperses back onto Jordan Street, most of them assume they've just watched the opening act of one coordinated village festival.

They haven't. What locals call "WinterFest" is really three separate volunteer organizations running three separate events on the same weekend, in the same park, for two entirely different causes. Knowing which is which changes where your ticket money goes and what you're actually signing up for when you register.

Three groups, none of them reporting to each other

Kolonko runs the Ice Farm, a Jordan-based ice sculpture business hired to carve the tower and the roughly two dozen sculptures placed around the village each Saturday morning. He's a vendor, not an organizer.

The Skaneateles Sunrise Rotary Club organizes Taste of Skaneateles, the ticketed food crawl that runs from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Saturday, along with the storefront scavenger hunt. Passes have run around $20 for individuals, $30 for couples, and $40 for a family in recent years, sold out of the Sherwood Inn and other village stops starting at 11 a.m. Proceeds fund the Rotary's own youth service projects.

The Skaneateles Polar Bear Club runs the Polar Plunge, and it runs it independently of the Rotary. The Plunge happens at 12:30 p.m. Saturday at Clift Park, near the gazebo, and the money raised supports the Skaneateles Fire Department, the Skaneateles Ambulance Volunteer Emergency Service, and the Skaneateles Education Foundation. Three different beneficiaries, chosen by a club that has nothing to do with who sells you your Taste ticket.

Ask someone walking Genesee Street who's in charge of WinterFest and you'll usually get one confident, incomplete answer.

The clearest proof these are genuinely separate operations came during a COVID year, when the Polar Bear Club canceled its Plunge outright while the Rotary's Taste of Skaneateles and the Ice Farm's sculptures went ahead as scheduled. A single festival committee doesn't cancel a third of itself and leave the rest standing. Three independent groups, sharing a weekend by long-standing habit, do exactly that.

What a hundred people in frozen water actually tells you

The Polar Bear Club held its inaugural Plunge in 2010 with 18 participants. This past January 31, the club held its 15th installment, and more than a hundred people from local businesses, nonprofits, and schools waded into Skaneateles Lake. The installment count trails the calendar count because of that one COVID cancellation, but the growth line is the real story: a volunteer club went from 18 people testing an idea to a hundred-plus turning it into an institution, without a marketing budget, without a parent organization, and without folding into the Rotary's operation next door.

That is not what a top-down festival looks like. It is what happens when a small village lets separate civic groups piggyback on shared momentum instead of centralizing it. The Rotary's Taste event and the Polar Bear Club's Plunge grew on parallel tracks, each accountable to its own donors, because nobody ever forced them into one committee to begin with.

How the weekend actually unfolds

1. Friday, 7 p.m., Clift Park. The Ice Farm lights the ice tower. It burns and collapses in about fifteen minutes. Free, no ticket, no registration.
2. Saturday, 11 a.m. Ice sculptures go up around the village, and Taste of Skaneateles passes go on sale at the Sherwood Inn and other stops.
3. Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Taste of Skaneateles runs. Recent lineups have included Cream & Coffee's waffle cone chips, Doug Fish Fry's fish and tartar sauce, Elephant and the Dove's Mexican fare, and a decades-old village cafe called Vermont Green Mountain, open for 35 years.
4. Saturday, 12:30 p.m., Clift Park, near the gazebo. The Skaneateles Polar Bear Club's Plunge goes off. Registration is separate from anything Rotary-related, and proceeds go to the fire department, ambulance corps, and education foundation.
5. Throughout Saturday. The scavenger hunt runs alongside everything else, with entry forms available at Taste ticket sites and historically turned in at the Skaneateles YMCA & Community Center.

None of these require you to know a single organizer's name to take part. But knowing the split matters if you're deciding where a donation should land. Buy a Taste ticket and your money supports Rotary youth grants. Register for the Plunge and it goes to the fire department, the ambulance corps, and the education foundation instead. Same Saturday, same park, two different checks written by the village to itself.

For details on registration and dates each year, the Skaneateles Polar Bear Club posts its own updates directly rather than through the Rotary, which is worth remembering the next time someone tells you WinterFest has an organizing committee. It has three, and they've never needed to merge.

None of this changes what the weekend feels like on the ground: a village of a few thousand people turning a frozen lake into a fundraiser for its own fire department, one melting ice tower and one plate of fish fry at a time. That kind of overlapping, informal civic effort is part of what makes a place like this hold together across decades rather than just seasons, and it's the same texture that shows up in conversations with buyers who ask what Skaneateles is actually like to live in once the summer crowds thin out.

If you're curious what else that kind of local rhythm looks like on a January afternoon, or you're thinking about property here for reasons that have nothing to do with a frozen lake, Molly Elliott has spent her whole life in this village and is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.