"It shows a sense of pride in our community," said Kristi Drake, executive director of Billings TrailNet, at the ribbon cutting for the Skyline Trail on December 7, 2023.
That was almost three years ago. If you live in Northwest Billings and your routine on the Rims still means parking at Zimmerman, doing your usual loop, and heading home, you're not wrong to do it that way. You're just doing it the old way, from before the corridor above your neighborhood became one continuous system instead of three separate destinations that happened to share a skyline.
What Actually Changed in 2023
For decades, the Rims above the west side of town functioned as a set of disconnected parks. Zimmerman Park had its singletrack. Swords Park had its paved overlook. The stretch of bluff running east toward the airport was mostly ignored except by mountain bikers willing to bushwhack. If you wanted to move between them, you drove.
The Skyline Trail closed that gap. It's a three-mile paved, multiuse path that runs along the south side of Highway 3 and connects Zimmerman Park to Swords Park, built by the City of Billings with Billings TrailNet as the driving nonprofit behind design and funding. The project cost roughly $3 million, paid for mostly through a federal BUILD grant with additional support from Phillips 66, which funded a restroom and bench installation at Zimmerman back in 2018 while the rest of the trail was still years from breaking ground.
Combine the new pavement with the existing dirt on either end and you get, according to Billings TrailNet, at least seven miles of continuous trail. That's not seven miles of separate outings stitched together in a brochure. It's a single corridor you can walk, run, or ride start to finish without getting back in a car.
Inside that corridor, Zimmerman Park still does the heavy lifting for anyone who wants dirt under their feet. It has six named trails. Middle Rim is the longest at 3.6 miles. Meyers Trail is the steepest, averaging a 9 percent grade, which is enough to make you notice on the way up and grateful on the way down. Indian Cliffs handles most of the elevation loss if you're headed the other direction. None of this shows up if you only ever do the same 20-minute loop from the main lot, which is exactly what a lot of longtime residents do.
What the Air Show Proved About This Ridge
Three weeks before this was written, the ridge above Northwest Billings hosted the closest thing this stretch of the Rims gets to a stress test.
The Blue Angels headlined the Yellowstone International Air Show at Billings Logan International Airport on August 22 and 23, part of the national celebration of America's 250th anniversary. More than 10,000 people gathered on the Rims near the airport for the first day alone, watching for free from the bluff instead of paying for a ticketed seat. Traffic backed up for hours along North 27th Street, Zimmerman Trail, and Airport Road as people tried to reach vantage points on the same ridge that Northwest Billings residents drive past every day without thinking twice about it.
That's useful information even if you skipped the show entirely. It confirms something residents already suspected but rarely had proof of: the road access to this ridge, specifically Zimmerman Trail Road, is the actual bottleneck. The trail system itself absorbed the crowd without complaint. The cars trying to get to it did not.
September doesn't have that problem. The parking lot at Zimmerman empties out, the interpretive kiosks along the shorter loops go back to being read by people who actually stop to read them, and the singletrack that felt crowded in July belongs again to the dog walkers, the trail runners doing hill repeats before work, and the mountain bikers who treat Meyers Trail as their regular Tuesday circuit.
The Loop Nobody's Finished Yet
Here's the part most people miss even after they've walked the connector: the Skyline Trail isn't the end goal. It's one leg of a larger concept Billings TrailNet calls the Marathon Loop, a planned 26.2-mile circuit around the city. Two pieces are still outstanding: a trail from ZooMontana and the Stagecoach Trail, which would run along Zimmerman Trail itself.
Until those get built, you can't circle the whole city on foot the way the concept imagines. What you can do right now, today, without waiting on any future funding round, is walk the middle third of that loop exactly as it was designed. Start at the Zimmerman Park lot, take the connector east, and finish at Swords Park with the Yellowstone River valley spread out below you the entire way. It's the one part of the Marathon Loop that's already finished, and it happens to run directly above the neighborhood.
Scott Brown, whose family owns The Base Camp, put it plainly when the trail opened: the connector is good for the local economy, for hotels and restaurants downstream of the increased foot traffic. For residents, the more immediate benefit is simpler. It's a finished piece of infrastructure sitting right outside your door, seven miles of it, and most of the year it's quiet enough that Jerry Kessler, who's been riding the Rims since high school, still calls it "a beautiful ride" without a hint of exaggeration.
What a Fall Morning on the Corridor Actually Looks Like
If you've never walked the full stretch, here's what the corridor breaks down to in practice:
- Zimmerman Park lot, off Zimmerman Trail Road, is your dirt access point. This is where Middle Rim and Meyers Trail start, and where most mountain bikers still begin their rides even after the connector opened.
- The Skyline Trail itself is paved the entire way, wide enough for strollers and wheelchairs, with benches and interpretive signage about the region's history spaced along the route. This is the stretch most likely to have a MET bus shelter and bike racks, built specifically to make the ridge more accessible than the old dirt-only routes allowed.
- Swords Park anchors the east end, with its own mix of paved and natural trail sections and some of the more dramatic overlooks of the Yellowstone River valley.
None of these three points requires a car to reach the other two, which is the entire point of what got built in 2023. It just takes most residents a while to reprogram a habit that predates the connector by years.
Fall is the season this actually gets used the way it was designed. School schedules pull family traffic off the trail during weekday mornings. Evening light comes in low and warm across the sandstone instead of glaring straight down the way it does in July. The singletrack that was packed with out-of-town hikers all summer, and briefly slammed with 10,000 air show spectators, goes back to being a neighborhood amenity instead of a regional attraction.
If you've lived in Northwest Billings for years and never walked past the fence line where your usual Zimmerman loop ends, this is the month to find out what's actually on the other side of it. The trail's been finished since 2023. The only thing that hasn't caught up yet is habit.
For anyone thinking about what it actually means to live minutes from this kind of access, or curious what homes near the Rims corridor look like on the market this fall, The Premier Group knows this stretch of Billings as well as anyone. Reach out when you're ready to talk.
