Stand at the Skyline Bus stop in Town Center on any weekday afternoon this summer and you'll notice something that wasn't true a year ago. The riders waiting for the shuttle aren't all wearing full-face helmets and pads. Some are in street clothes with a rental bike between their knees, waiting for a free ride up to a trail that doesn't require them to already know what they're doing.
That trail is called Hot Dog, and its existence answers a question Big Sky residents have been asking since at least 2018. Not "how do we get more trail." Big Sky has never lacked for trail. The question was narrower and more stubborn: how does someone who has never ridden a mountain bike get from the resort back down to Meadow Village without either driving, walking, or gritting through a trail built for people who already know how to ride.
The Route Everyone Asked For
Mountain to Meadow, the five-mile shuttle classic that connects Big Sky Resort to town, is beloved for a reason. It's also fast, flowy, and by most local accounts a little intimidating if you're new. For years, the gap between "I want to try mountain biking" and "I can safely descend M2M" had no bridge. During the creation of the 2018 Big Sky Trails Plan, an easy, family-friendly route between Big Sky and Town Center came back as the single most requested trail in resident surveys, according to Kevin Daily, president of Trail Dogs, the Big Sky chapter of the Southwest Montana Mountain Bike Association.
Daily traces the original idea to two longtime Trail Dogs members, Max Erpenbach and Wes Hoecker. What they sketched out took eight years, three separate landowners, and a construction crew that had never built anything quite like it to actually become dirt on the ground.
"I've never seen a trail like this in all my years of mountain biking," Daily said once it was finally rideable. "It's the widest mountain bike trail I've ever seen."
Three Landowners, Two Years of Paperwork
The delay wasn't design. It was permission. The Hot Dog Trail's 3.5 miles cross land held by three different owners, and Big Sky Community Organization had to secure an easement from each one before a shovel could move. Boyne Resorts granted the first easement in 2025, letting builder Pete Costain and his company TerraFlow Trails start on the initial stretch. The harder piece came this year, when BSCO finally reached an agreement with Middle Fork Partners, which owns roughly 60 percent of the land the trail crosses. Lone Mountain Land Company, which holds a smaller parcel near the trail's end, supplied the third and final easement without much friction once the other two were in place.
Terraflow finished construction in June 2026. The opening itself slipped by a couple of weeks because of wet weather that kept the dirt from setting up, and the trail ended up debuting close to the Fourth of July once conditions dried out.
Liv Grubaugh, senior director of development and communications for BSCO, put it plainly when the trail opened. This project wasn't the work of one organization or one funding source, she said. It was the result of a community coming together.
What $212,000 Actually Bought
That community-coming-together line isn't just a nice sentiment. The trail cost $212,000 to build, and Trail Dogs led fundraising that pulled from an unusually wide set of pockets:
- Individual donations through Give Big Gallatin Valley
- Big Sky Resort Tax
- Local businesses including Gravity Haus, Gallatin Alpine Sports, Kelly Kern, and the Hungry Moose
- Conoco
- The Moonlight, Yellowstone Club, and Spanish Peaks community foundations
For that money, Big Sky got a trail that runs 3.5 miles parallel to Mountain to Meadow, with a width ranging six to nine feet and an average grade of 5.5 percent, dropping more than 1,200 feet over its length. Costain, who has spent years building trails across the region, told local outlet Explore Big Sky it's the longest trail of that width he's ever built. It carries some berms and rollers for riders who want to find speed, but the descent stays controlled enough that a first-time rider can manage it without white-knuckling the whole way down.
How Locals Are Actually Using It
The mechanics of getting there matter as much as the trail itself. Riders climb to the Hot Dog cutoff on Huff's Trek, the same double-track used to reach Mountain to Meadow, roughly two miles with about 500 feet of climbing. The turnoff to Hot Dog sits at about the halfway point. Most people skip the climb entirely and take the free Skyline Bus shuttle, which can carry up to 17 riders at a time straight to the top. The trail is technically open to both directions and to hikers, but BSCO designed it to be ridden as a descent, and that's how most locals are using it.
The clearest proof that Hot Dog has already become part of Big Sky's working trail network showed up last weekend at the Big Sky Biggie. Race organizers rerouted the 50-mile and 30-mile courses this year to send riders up Huff's Trek, left onto Hot Dog to reach the resort base area, then up a dirt road to the top of Andesite Mountain before descending Snake Charmer into the familiar Mountain to Meadow. Proceeds from the Biggie go to the Big Sky Community Organization and the SWMMBA Big Sky chapter, the same two organizations that spent years securing the easements and funding to build the trail the race now runs through. The Hot Dog Trail isn't just a new line on the map. It's already feeding back into the system that built it.
None of this required a ribbon-cutting or a press conference to matter. It required eight years of patience, three signatures on three easement agreements, and a list of small businesses willing to chip in alongside ski resort foundations. That's a fairly accurate picture of how things get built in Big Sky. Slowly, through relationships, and usually because someone kept asking for eight years.
If you're already riding the shuttle down Hot Dog on a Tuesday afternoon, you don't need us to tell you Big Sky works this way. But it's worth knowing the next time BSCO asks for a donation or Trail Dogs puts out a survey. The last time residents answered one of those, it took less than a decade to get exactly what they asked for.
Montana Property Brokers keeps close watch on the projects and people shaping daily life across Big Sky, Paradise Valley, and the rest of southwest Montana. If you'd like these updates alongside off-market opportunities as they come up, reach out and we'll add you to the list.
