Two Moon Park has an upper area near Bench Boulevard and a lower area beside the Yellowstone River, with distinct settings to explore.
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 has 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. Visitors can take in the bluff-top view from the upper area or follow the paved stretch toward MetraPark.
The Road to the Lower Parking Area
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. The lower lot provides shade, meadow, and direct river frontage. It's a five-minute drive from the upper lot.
Trails Through the Lower Park
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, passing four named meadows: 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. The trails offer a different setting from the bluff-top view.
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 the Billings Jaycees hold their haunted walk at Two Moon Park.
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, said of Yellowstone County's run of river-access parks in a KTVQ report.
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.
Haunted Hallows on the Lower Trails
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. The event gives visitors a chance to walk the lower trails; the trails are open and free to use throughout the year.
Planning a Visit to the Lower Park
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.
The lower park is only a few minutes from many Heights homes and offers another way to explore Two Moon Park.
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.
