BOZEMAN — Gallatin County and the Gallatin Valley Land Trust (GVLT) want to build a trail system that connects Belgrade, the Four Corners area and Bozeman.
The partnership between the county and the GVLT comes a month after the Main Street to the Mountains trail in Bozeman was completed.
Now the county will work with the Bozeman non-profit and a hired consultant to create a similar trails system, but in the rapidly growing Four Corners and Belgrade area.
The idea is to improve connectivity between neighborhoods, schools, parks and commercial areas within the existing gaps outside of the Bozeman area.
The county and GVLT are currently in the planning phases of the trail system project, which they say is an important part of planning for development in the future.
“If we're going to have more dense development in that area, it's so critical that we think about this connectivity now rather than 30 years from now, struggling to connect things after the fact. It is virtually impossible to do that,” said EJ Porth, communications and outreach director at GVLT.
GVLT says most of the trails will be a part of new neighborhood construction and development projects in the Belgrade and Four Corners area, and most of the cost of the new trail system will be on developers and perspective homeowners in the area.
