MONTICELLO, N.Y.—Ten new ski trails are being added to Holiday Mountain this season, more than double the nine that were open last season at the ski area in the southern Catskills region.
Mike Taylor, 58, a lifelong Monticello resident, bought Holiday Mountain in 2023, rescuing the struggling ski mountain from becoming a housing development. He has since invested more than $15 million in opening new lifts, trails, and a summer camp.
A new side of the mountain is being groomed for skiing. Ten trails are being cut, with a new lift overlooking New York State Route 17, and a snow tubing slope with a lodge and conveyor belt.
Currently, the area has two chairlifts and a vertical drop of 400 feet, with the longest run at 3,696 feet (a little over two-thirds of a mile).
Taylor told The Epoch Times on Sept. 11 why he has been making improvements so rapidly.
“I got to get it done. You know, if we have the ability to pull it off—that’s our whole goal here,” he said.
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“If we lose this ski area, there’s no other choices within 45 miles south of us, and then you have to drive an hour, almost an hour and a half north, to find a ski area. It’s just really saving skiing for this whole region.”
A connecting trail across the top of the mountain connects all the trails. The new trails include Free Bird, a very steep double black diamond trail for experts, and an intermediate trail named Irish Goodbye.
Some of the new trail names, such as Bada Bing and Yada Yada, are references to popular TV shows such as “The Sopranos” and “Seinfeld.”
Other trail names focus on local history. The Cimarron City trail is named after a Catskills cowboy village attraction that operated in Monticello in the late 1950s and early ’60s.
The Big Vanilla trail is named after a defunct, nearby ski mountain, Big Vanilla at Davos, which shut down in the ’80s. The Hackledam trail is named after an abandoned hamlet that straddles the Neversink River, a few miles downstream from Holiday Mountain.
Several trails, such as New Year’s Eve, The Bowl, and the Roman Candle, are holdover trails from the mountain’s glory days. At its peak during the late Borscht Belt years, Holiday Mountain had 14 trails, Taylor said.
Holiday Mountain is located in the town of Monticello, snug between New York State Route 17 and the Neversink River, from which it draws water for the snow guns.
It opened as a municipal ski mountain in 1957, and boomed in the 1960s and 1970s. Later, the mountain suffered financially under various owners, eventually closing all but three trails and one lift.
Taylor felt a personal fondness for the 440-foot-tall mountain, as he had grown up skiing its slopes, and the mountain was historically his family’s property. When no one would buy the mountain, and it seemed doomed to be a housing development, Taylor decided to step up.
His great-grandmother had owned a large swath of land in Monticello that was split when Route 17 was built. The property on the opposite side of the highway from the family house, encompassing part of Holiday Mountain, was sold to the town, allowing for its opening to the public.
The mountain is focusing on being accessible and family-oriented, Taylor said.
“I’m never going to be Killington in Vermont, a big, huge place. But we know our size and what we are, and we’re really good at what we’re doing.”
Holiday Mountain owner Mike Taylor speaks during a tour of the mountain trail construction at the Holiday Mountain Ski Area in Monticello, N.Y., on Sept. 11, 2026. Oliver Mantyk/The Epoch Times
He’s focused on getting high school racing competitions and after-school programs onto his trails. One of the new trails will have a race-timing building. It’s been difficult to attract school clubs and organizations because schools don’t want to pay for busing and chaperones, Taylor said.
This was the first year of Taylor’s summer day camp. He put in a new swimming pool; refurbished and built multiple indoor facilities, including an arts and crafts building; and made pickleball, basketball, and gaga ball (dodgeball) courts.
He said the camp will constitute the mountain’s warm season offerings for the foreseeable future, as mountain biking and similar sports result in too many injuries and lawsuits.
Next year, Taylor said, he will work on expanding the main lodge, which isn’t big enough now to accommodate the current customer base, which also isn’t large enough to sustain a positive growth cycle. When the lodge is done, he’ll put more effort into marketing the place, he said.
“Our numbers aren’t anywhere near where we need to be, but we don’t have the capacity. But sooner or later, as people discover us and they realize that it’s a cool place and it’s family-affordable and -friendly and easy to get to, I think it’s going to be very successful,” he said.
