Ask ten people in the Heights what's at Two Moon Park and you'll get the same answer nine times: a gravel lot off Bench Boulevard, a couple of picnic tables, a restroom, and a view down into the Yellowstone River valley. Ask them about the Weeping Wall, or the little peninsula locals call The Point, and you'll get a shrug. That's because the Two Moon Park most of the neighborhood knows is only the top half. The rest of it sits one switchback road below, nearly four miles of trail that most people who live within a mile of the entrance have never actually walked.
The Park Above the River
The entrance sits at the edge of the Heights, just off Bench Boulevard near the Centennial Ice Arena. The upper section is what almost everyone experiences: a parking area, picnic tables, a public restroom, and a bluff-top view east across the river. It's also where the paved Dutcher Trail starts, a corridor that connects on foot or by bike toward Earl Guss Park near MetraPark in one direction and Coulson Park upstream in the other. For a lot of Heights residents, that's the whole park. Pull in, look at the view, maybe walk the paved stretch toward MetraPark, drive home.
The Road Most People Never Drive
Keep going past the upper lot, though, and the entrance road doesn't stop. It drops through a pair of switchbacks into the cottonwood trees below, ending at a second, entirely separate parking area in the river bottom. This lower lot is where the park most people picture when they hear "riverside park" actually shows up: shade, meadow, direct river frontage. It's a five-minute drive from the upper lot. Plenty of people who've lived in the Heights for a decade have never made that turn.
Four Miles You Didn't Know Were There
From the lower lot, five trails fan out through the woods and meadows. Two are worth knowing by name. Old Eagle Trail is the only one that heads south, climbing back up past the Weeping Wall to rejoin the upper park. Rocky Jeune Trail is the longest, running nearly a mile along the river through what one county parks writeup calls
"Hansel-and-Gretel-like bowers"
on its way to The Point, a triangular spit of land formed where a spring-fed creek runs into the Yellowstone. Between those two and the shorter connecting paths, the full network adds up to close to four miles, threading through four named meadows most Heights residents have never heard of: Helen's Meadow against the base of the Weeping Wall, Jim Phelps Meadow near the park's center, and the wider Ohdeer and Northern Meadows just west of The Point. None of it looks anything like the bluff-top view most people associate with the park's name.
A Cliff That Cries and a Legend That Sticks
The Weeping Wall is the park's centerpiece, a cliff face on the downstream end of the lower park that seeps with natural springs year round. It draws birds most of the year and turns into sheets of ice in winter, which makes a cold-weather walk down there worth the trip even if you've written off the park as a summer-only spot. It's also picked up a ghost story over the years, a "Weeping Woman" said to walk the riverbank nearby, and that bit of local folklore is part of why the Billings Jaycees chose this exact stretch of trail for their haunted walk rather than somewhere flatter and better lit.
The Land Had a Life Before the Trails
The park is named for Two Moons, the Northern Cheyenne chief who fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but the land underneath it has a scrappier history. Before it was parkland, the site did time as a gravel pit and later a junkyard, according to the Yellowstone River Parks Association's own account of the property. At some point, Two Moon Park and Coulson Park even traded names, which is the kind of detail that makes old plat maps and current street signs disagree with each other.
Keeping the place running is mostly volunteer work. The Yellowstone River Parks Association, an all-volunteer nonprofit that's been developing and maintaining parks along the Yellowstone since 1991, helps manage trail upkeep and invasive species control at Two Moon and neighboring Earl Guss Park, one piece of roughly 2,000 acres of river parkland the group either owns or helps maintain with more than 8,000 volunteer hours a year. That effort now includes Yellowstone County's first boot-brush station, installed at the park entrance so hikers can knock invasive weed seeds off their boots before carrying them to the next trailhead. "We're spoiled," the park's caretaker, Anthony Sammartano, has said of Yellowstone County's run of river-access parks, and Two Moon is usually the one he means.
The lower lot itself got a fix in 2019, when Yellowstone County used funds from the Yellowstone River Recreation Project Priority Plan, money tied to restoration work from the 2011 ExxonMobil pipeline spill, to regrade the lot and stop the pooling water that had been turning it into a mess after every rain.
The One Night a Year Everyone Finally Walks the Lower Loop
Every October, the Billings Jaycees turn the park's lower trails into their Haunted Hallows walk, a roughly one-mile route through the woods with actors stationed along the way. Tickets run $10, or $20 if you want to skip the line, and organizers have said the event has raised more than $100,000 for local causes since it started in 2012. It's worth noticing what that means: the one night of the year when a big chunk of Billings actually walks the part of Two Moon Park that isn't the parking lot, it's Halloween. The rest of the year, those same trails sit open and free, mostly empty, less than a mile from homes that have never used them.
If You're Finally Ready to See the Other Half
A few things make the lower park easier to enjoy once you know it's there. Bring bug spray in summer. The upper park stays breezy enough to keep mosquitoes down, but the lower park is sheltered and well watered, which means the bugs that skip the bluff find plenty to like in the river bottom. Go once in winter just to see the Weeping Wall iced over. And grab the free printable trail map before your first trip down the switchbacks, since the lower loop's five-trail junction isn't the kind of thing you want to guess your way through on the first try. A stand of young apple trees planted along some of the paths is a small, easy way to tell you're somewhere new versus retracing the same loop from the upper lot.
None of this requires a special occasion. It's a park that's been sitting a few minutes from a lot of Heights front doors the whole time, doing more than most of its neighbors have given it credit for.
Knowing a neighborhood down to its back trails and its old zoning quirks is a big part of how Heidi Brosovich and the Brosovich Real Estate Team work with buyers and sellers across Billings. If you're curious what a home near the Heights, or any of the neighborhoods we cover, is actually worth in today's market, reach out any time. We're always glad to talk trails first and real estate second.
