Four Seasons Ski Area in New York Closes After 63 Years
John Goodfellow was there “from day one” of the nation’s shortest chairlift-served ski area
Before commercial jet travel, before the internet, before national ski passes, before NIMBYs and the Age of No, before a 6:30 a.m. Delta flight out of JFK could deliver Upper West Side Wesley and his Ikon Pass to the Snowbird tram by noon, New York was a dizzying, dazzling ski state. Big and snowy and hilly and industrial and laced with railroads linking New York City’s millions to Upstate’s vast wilderness, its frontiers held all the ingredients to provide skiing and none of today’s disincentives. From the 1920s through the 1960s ski areas multiplied across the Catskills and the Adirondacks and the Taconics by the hundreds. Some were ropetows spinning through Packard engines funded by per-ride nickels dropped into Mason jars and some were state-funded military-grade operations staking lift towers to mountain summits.
We don’t know exactly how many ski areas have ever existed in New York, and it is unlikely that we ever will. But we do know that, like animal species, almost every one that ever lived has gone extinct. Or at least, many more have died than have survived. Of the hundreds of New York ski areas for which we have operational records, 50 are expected to open this winter.
Fifty is both a large and a small number, an encouraging and an alarming one. No U.S. state operates more ski areas than New York, yet the state has lost so many. Most of them went away a long time ago. Typically with little ceremony. They close one spring and don’t re-open the next winter or the next and the trails grow in and memorial pages materialize on Facebook and it’s just “remember when.” A few, like Hickory and Cockaigne and Big Tupper, linger, open, close, fade, re-appear every three or four years like a superhero sequel, tethered to existence by individuals who won’t let the mountains die but can’t quite figure out how to make them live without life support.
What we rarely get, in New York or anywhere else, is clarity: the sudden, final, unceremonious, unambiguous ending to a ski area’s story.
We have clarity now. Four Seasons ski area (no connection to the hotel chain) is closing for good. John Goodfellow, who is 79 and strung the first ropetow up the hill with his father in 1962, is selling the ski area to developers who, he says, have no appetite for the rigors of ski area operation. He is selling the lifts and the snowmaking equipment and the snowcats and the rental gear. The property’s sale price is $2.5 million, a sum that Goodfellow says the ski and golf business, built between onetime farms that are now high-end housing developments, could never recuperate. The developers, Goodfellow says, will instead build “some kind of housing” on the property.
“I didn’t have any way to carry it on,” Goodfellow, who has lived in Fayetteville, the Syracuse bedroom community where he built Four Seasons, for most of his life, told me in a recent phone call. “I feel bad.”
Four Seasons the ski area has long been an outlier and a curiosity. It is – or I guess was – the shortest chairlift-served ski area in America, spinning a 107-vertical-foot, 460-foot-long secondhand Borvig double chair trucked up from Holiday Valley, New York (the 110-vertical-foot ski area at Double H Ranch, a New York camp for ill children, will now claim the shortest-with-a-chairlift title; the shortest for a ski area open to the general public is the 114-vertical-foot Mountaintop ski area at Grand Geneva, Wisconsin). Small hills tend to run simpler, cheaper surface lifts. That is mostly because small hills tend to be run by budget-conscious organizations that heavily subsidize operations: schools, municipalities, private clubs, housing associations, the military, or nonprofit organizations formed for the explicit purpose of the ski area’s survival. Only around 15 percent of America’s 50 or so ski areas under 150 vertical feet operate as for-profit businesses. One of those is – or I guess was – Four Seasons. In a Darwinian New York ski landscape that has chewed through hundreds of ski areas, many of them far larger than Four Seasons, the bump’s 63-year run is a remarkable achievement.
“We had our own little world here,” Goodfellow says. “We taught thousands to ski.”
It is tempting to catastrophize Four Seasons’ closing. No new ski area will replace it. It is nearly impossible, in today’s America, to build a new ski area, especially in any remotely residential zone. And no one will re-open it like Saddleback, Maine or Norway Mountain, Michigan or Laurel, Pennsylvania. The trail footprint will disappear beneath generic cul-de-saced 4,000-square-foot houses in a development called Whispering Pinecones or Bugling Moose Falls. Future thousands will not learn to ski here, and at least some of those thousands will never learn to ski at all because the most obvious place to learn skiing went away.
It is also tempting to oversimplify this story, to stuff the closing of one small weather-dependent business into the meta-narratives of climate change or ski industry consolidation or skyrocketing insurance, utilities, and labor costs. Small ski areas can’t survive because [fill in the blank].
These challenges, especially costs, are part of Four Seasons’ story. But only part. Lake-effect snowbands still chug reliably off of Lake Ontario. Skier visits and number of operating days, Goodfellow says, have held steady for years.
The more interesting story here is not why Four Seasons is closing in 2025, but why it didn’t close 40 years ago, when mountains with five or 10 times its vertical drop and with 100 times its skiable acreage were shutting across the Northeast like wagon factories in 1900s Detroit. The answer, I believe, is fairly straightforward: an extraordinary run of longevity by an owner who looked after the ski area with a sort of caretakers’ zeal that is increasingly rare in America’s complex modern economy and distracted society.
“Four Seasons was John Goodfellow, and John Goodfellow was Four Seasons,” Ski Areas of New York President Scott Brandi told me.