Drive up Little Coyote Road past the Big Sky Chapel this month and you'll see it before you see anything else: orange construction fencing wrapped around a section of the park that, from the road, looks finished. Kids are still dropping into the skate bowl. The pickleball courts are full most evenings. It reads like a park that wrapped up its renovation a while back and moved on.
It hasn't. Big Sky Community Park is in the last stretch of a three-year rebuild, and right now, several pieces of it are closed. If you've been putting off a pickup basketball game or assuming the rock wall would be free this weekend, this is the update you need before you head over.
The Part Everyone Already Uses
The renovation's earlier phases are the ones locals have absorbed into daily life without much thought. The skate park, expanded and rebuilt with Dreamland Skateparks, now runs longer and faster than the original, with beginner and intermediate sections that roughly doubled the square footage. Next to it sits the pump track, funded in part by a $50,000 donation from Lone Mountain Land Company through a partnership with the Southwest Montana Mountain Bike Association.
The tennis and pickleball complex went through its own overhaul. Eight new pickleball courts and two tennis courts replaced the older, cracked surfaces, and the fix wasn't handed down from above. The pickleball and tennis community itself raised more than 75 percent of the roughly $1 million renovation cost. There's also a new ADA-accessible playground with a zipline and a toddler area, built with support from the Big Sky Resort Area District.
None of this is new information if you use the park weekly. What's easy to miss is that these completed pieces were phase one of a longer plan, not the whole project.
What's Actually Roped Off Right Now
According to the Big Sky Community Organization's current project page, the park's remaining original facilities are closed for the rest of the year while the final phase moves forward:
- The softball fields
- The multiuse fields
- The rock climbing area
- The basketball court
That's a meaningful chunk of the park sitting behind fencing through the end of 2026, not because something went wrong, but because BSCO is mid-build on what comes next.
One More Phase: The Community Campus
BSCO calls this last stretch the Community Campus, and it's aimed at the corner of the park anchored by Camp Big Sky and the Riverside Pavilion. The plan adds two new sand volleyball courts, a new basketball court, and a new recreation area near the pavilion. As of this fall, earthwork on the Community Campus is underway, and construction on the volleyball and basketball courts is set to begin next month.
That timing matters if you're planning around it. The courts you might expect to use for a fall pickup game are the ones being replaced, and they won't reopen until the build finishes. If your routine has been "walk over, see what's open," this is the season to check ahead first.
A Park the Community Actually Funded
The scope of this project traces back to July 2023, when BSCO marked its 25th year at the annual Parks and Trails Gala and launched what it called the "ALL OUT for Parks & Trails" campaign: a three-year, roughly $10 million push to renovate the park, add 20 miles of trail, and build an entirely new 6-acre park in the south fork area near Town Center.
BSCO CEO Whitney Montgomery framed it at the gala as work tied to the organization's legacy in the valley, and board chair Tallie Lancey put the ambition plainly:
"We want to connect the mountain to the meadow to the canyon. We want to add 20 miles of trail. We're talking about year-round recreation."
The money behind it isn't coming from a single source. It's a mix of community donations, Big Sky Resort Area District's resort tax dollars, and private contributions like the Lone Mountain Land Company gift toward the pump track. In a town where the private clubs a few miles away fund their own championship golf courses and spa buildings, the public park down the road got its pickleball courts because the people who use them chipped in three-quarters of the bill.
Why the New Baseball Field Is a Bigger Deal Than It Sounds
One detail from the renovation plan explains more than it seems to at first. Among the field upgrades is a 90-foot turf baseball field, sized to adult regulation standards, replacing one of the existing softball fields. It's built for Lone Peak High School's baseball program, which is new enough that in its first season the team couldn't host a single home game because the field available to them was undersized and too often wet to play on.
Head coach John McGuire called it a need the community was finally addressing, and said the upgrade means kids from tee-ball through high school get access to a field built for the sport rather than adapted for it. It's a small note in a larger construction list, but it's the kind of detail that tells you this renovation wasn't a wish list assembled by a committee in a conference room. It was built around specific gaps that Big Sky families were already running into.
What to Do This Fall While It Finishes
If your usual park routine runs through one of the closed sections, a few workarounds are worth knowing. BASE, the indoor community center that sits inside the park complex, has its own climbing wall, gym, and drop-in courts, so the outdoor rock wall closure doesn't have to mean no climbing until spring. For pickup basketball, that program has shifted indoors to BASE for the season rather than waiting on the outdoor court rebuild.
If you're looking to walk it off on a trail instead, the same campaign that's funding the Community Campus has already delivered new mileage elsewhere. Tanner's Way now connects Town Center toward the North Fork, and Huff's Trek adds another multi-use route into the backcountry. Both came out of the same three-year push, which means the closures at the park and the new trail options aren't unrelated. They're two ends of the same project.
The Park Isn't Finished, and That's the Point
It's tempting to look at a rebuilt skate park and a full slate of pickleball courts and assume the work is behind Big Sky Community Park. The reality is that the most visible upgrades came first, and the harder infrastructure, new fields, new courts, a new recreation hub near the river, is still being poured this fall. For a park that 44 acres of Meadow Village residents treat as an extension of their backyard, knowing which section is fenced off before you load up the car saves a wasted trip. And knowing who paid for the parts that are already open says something about how this community tends to get things built.
Meadow Village keeps changing in ways that aren't always visible from a listing photo, whether it's a park mid-renovation or a road project reshaping how you get to it. If you're thinking about what any of that means for a property you own or one you're watching, the team at Life in Big Sky knows this neighborhood block by block. Live Big. Connect with our team.
