Ride the new Hot Dog Trail on a Tuesday morning this August and you'll pass through three different pieces of private land before you ever cross a road. That's the part locals talking about the trail tend to skip. The bigger story isn't the ribbon cutting. It's that this beginner-friendly, half-mile-wide corridor between Big Sky and Town Center needed three separate landowners to say yes, one at a time, across the eight years since residents first asked for it, before a single shovel of dirt moved.
That fact tells you something about how this town actually works that most residents haven't had to think about, because most of the trails they already use were built decades ago under different rules. Big Sky doesn't have a municipal parks department with the power to condemn land for a greenway. It doesn't have zoning authority that can require a developer to hand over an easement as a condition of approval. Big Sky is unincorporated. The organization building its trail network, the Big Sky Community Organization, functions like a parks department but runs on philanthropy and the Big Sky Resort Area Tax District instead of property taxes. Every new connector trail here gets built the way the Hot Dog Trail got built: by asking.
The trail nobody could just build
The idea for a flat, family-friendly route linking Big Sky to Town Center goes back to 2018, when BSCO drew up its first Trails Plan and asked residents what they wanted most. An easy connector between those two areas topped the list. Trail Dogs, the local chapter of the Southwest Montana Mountain Bike Association, credits two of its longtime members, Max Erpenbach and Wes Hoecker, with pushing the original concept.
Wanting the trail and being allowed to build it turned out to be two different problems. The route needed to cross land owned by three different parties. Boyne Resorts granted the first easement in 2025, which let builder Terraflow start on the initial section. The larger obstacle was Middle Fork Partners, which owns roughly 60 percent of the land the trail crosses. BSCO didn't secure that easement until 2026. Lone Mountain Land Company held a small parcel at the trail's far end and came through with the third and final piece once the other two were in place. Terraflow finished construction in June 2026.
Marco DelGuidice, BSCO's director of parks and trails, put the design intent simply: the Hot Dog Trail is meant as an on-ramp, a place where someone new to mountain biking can build confidence without faster, more experienced riders crowding the same tread. It parallels the existing Mountain to Meadow Trail a short distance to the south, so Big Sky now has two ways to move between those neighborhoods without touching a car.
"It definitely took a ton of work, and we're just so happy the easement is in place, and it can be something that the community can enjoy forever."
That's Kevin Daily, president of Trail Dogs, describing what it felt like to finally get all three signatures. He's not exaggerating the difficulty. A trail most residents will ride in twenty minutes without a second thought took a working group years to unlock, one landowner conversation at a time.
What $212,000 actually paid for
The Hot Dog Trail cost $212,000 to build, and none of that came from a municipal budget line, because there isn't one. Trail Dogs raised the money through Give Big Gallatin Valley, the region's annual community giving day, supplemented by contributions from Gravity Haus, Gallatin Alpine Sports, Kelly Kern and the Hungry Moose, and Conoco. The Moonlight, Yellowstone Club, and Spanish Peaks community foundations also chipped in.
Daily described the funding base as a long list of individual donors rather than a single grant or sponsor. That's worth sitting with. A trail connecting two neighborhoods in a town of Big Sky's size and reputation got built the same way a school fundraiser gets built: door to door, business to business, foundation by foundation, until the number added up. The Resort Area Tax District covers a share of BSCO's broader operations, but a specific capital project like this one still depends on the community deciding it wants to pay for it.
That's the mechanism behind every trail in Big Sky, not just this one. It's why BSCO's other current build, a short flow spur called Coldsmoke Out and Back that forks off the established Mud Creek Trail, gets described on BSCO's own trail pages as "newly built" rather than "recently funded by the district." Somebody asked for that one too.
What the map actually gets you
Set the funding story aside for a second and look at what the trail does on the ground. The Hot Dog Trail gives Big Sky a second beginner-grade route between the Big Sky area and Town Center that doesn't put a rider or a family on foot anywhere near Highway 191. Paired with the existing Mountain to Meadow Trail, that means two low-stress ways to get a kid to a friend's house, get yourself to a Wednesday farmers market run, or get a dog walked somewhere that isn't a shoulder.
BSCO maintains more than 23 miles of multi-use, multi-directional trail across the community, linking Town Center, Meadow Village, Gallatin Canyon, and Lone Mountain into one connected system rather than a scatter of disconnected loops. Most of it stays open year-round, though a handful of higher-elevation segments close seasonally for snow or hazard reasons. The Hot Dog Trail is a small addition to that total mileage, but it closes a specific gap that residents had been asking BSCO to close since at least 2018.
DelGuidice's framing matters here too. Building an easier, lower-traffic route isn't just about beginner comfort. It's traffic management for the whole network, keeping faster mountain bikers on Mountain to Meadow while giving families, casual walkers, and first-time riders their own lane on Hot Dog. That's a level of trail planning most residents never see, because it only shows up when you compare the two parallel routes side by side and notice they're built for different speeds on purpose.
The rest of the map is moving too
The Hot Dog Trail isn't an isolated project. It's one entry in a season of small, community-funded additions to the same system, and looking at the others helps explain why this particular mechanism, asking landowners and asking donors, keeps working here.
A few other things moving right now, all under BSCO's stewardship:
- The Coldsmoke Out and Back spur, a short flow addition off Mud Creek Trail for riders who want more distance without leaving the established corridor
- The Hike Big Sky series, a free, no-registration Saturday group hike that has rotated through Storybook trailhead for an easy South Fork morning, Beehive Basin trailhead for one of the area's signature alpine routes, and Pioneer Falls trailhead for a shorter walk to a hidden waterfall
- Continued planning work near the quarry development site for a new network of hiking, Nordic ski, and mountain bike trails that would further expand the system beyond its current mileage
None of these required legislation. Each one required somebody at BSCO or Trail Dogs to have a conversation with a landowner, a donor, or both, and then follow through. That's the pattern the Hot Dog Trail makes visible if you know to look for it.
For a resident, the practical upshot is straightforward. The trail system connecting your neighborhood to the rest of Big Sky isn't static, and it isn't handed down from a planning department with a budget cycle. It grows because people in this community keep asking for specific things and paying for them directly, one easement and one donation at a time. The Hot Dog Trail took eight years and $212,000 to prove that the system still works. Whether the next connector takes that long again probably depends on how many people show up the next time Trail Dogs or BSCO needs a signature or a check.
If you're already living in Big Sky and want to understand how a specific property connects to this growing trail network, or you're weighing a move into one of the neighborhoods these routes now link, Michelle Horning can walk you through what's changed on the ground and what it means for daily life here. Schedule a free consultation to talk through the details.
