Butte-Silver Bow Parks and Recreation enhances community life through parks, trails, aquatics, recreation, and urban forestry—providing vibrant and accessible outdoor spaces for all. Altogether, the Butte-Silver Bows’s park sites total more than 450 acres of developed and undeveloped park land that provide both active and passive recreation opportunities for residents, supplemented by the incredible public lands and open spaces in the Butte-Silver Bow area. Currently, the city provides sports fields and other athletic facilities including outdoor basketball courts, a skateboard park, tennis, and volleyball courts, ice skating rinks, and a nine-hole and par-3 golf course. Partnerships with local youth organizations provide recreation opportunities including little league, football, tennis, and soccer. Butte-Silver Bow natural areas include Thompson Park, a 3,800-acre forested park south of Butte that is co-owned and co-managed by the U.S. Forest Service; Big Butte, which is 310 acres; Skyline Park, which is 60 acres; Basin Creek Reservoir, which is 42 acres; and Blacktail Creek, which is 10 acres. Butte-Silver Bow has developed an urban trail system within its parks as well as trails that connect to surrounding open spaces utilizing many of the Butte’s railroad and stream corridors such as the Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railroad (BA&P) corridor, Blacktail, and Silver Bow Creek Greenway Trails. City-county trails are only a piece of the trails recreation available in the Butte area. The Forest Service maintains numerous trails in the Beaverhead-Deer Lodge National Forest, including the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail (CDNST), which runs to the immediate east and south of Butte and has numerous connections to local trails at Thompson Park, Blacktail Canyon, and Maud S Canyon. The CDNST and other trails are easily accessible within a 15-20 minute drive from Butte at the Homestake (on I-90) and Pipestone (on MT-2) trailheads.
