Anyone who has ridden the fire road straight up Cowboy Hill knows the feeling: legs burning, gravel sliding underfoot, no sign anywhere telling you how much farther to the top. That climb has looked more or less the same for decades. Word is finally circulating that could change, and the reason it took this long says something true about how the two biggest trail systems inside Rapid City actually work.
Most locals lump "M-Hill" and "Skyline" together as the two in-town spots you can ride or hike without leaving the city limits. They are not the same kind of place. One belongs to Rapid City. The other belongs to a private foundation with no obligation to spend a dollar of tax money on it. That difference has been quietly shaping both hills for twenty years, and 2026 is the year it became visible on the ground.
Two Landmarks, One Public, One Not
Hanson-Larsen Memorial Park, the roughly 300 acres that locals call M-Hill or Cowboy Hill, is a nonprofit park. It was created by Edna Marie "Eddie" Larsen, a lifelong Hermosa-area rancher who died in 2004 at age 93, to memorialize her parents Ed Larsen and Etta Hanson-Larsen. The park's own funding runs entirely on the foundation's money, not city or county budgets.
Skyline Wilderness Area is the opposite arrangement. Its 150 acres, including Dinosaur Park, sit on city land and get maintained through Rapid City's parks budget. When Skyline needs new signage or accessibility work, that decision runs through the same capital improvement process as any other city asset. When Cowboy Hill needs something built, it runs through whatever the foundation's board decides to spend.
That split explains why the two hills have had such different years.
What It Actually Took to Get Cowboy Hill a Real Trail Plan
The summit approach to Cowboy Hill has carried the "M" since 1912, when South Dakota School of Mines students built the letter on what was then still called Cowboy Hill. The tradition never stopped. Every year, Mines students still hike up to repaint it, and the school's radio station still broadcasts from a transmission tower on the next sub-summit over. That history is part of why the hill has local weight that goes beyond trail mileage.
The trail network below it did get real design attention between 2008 and 2018, when International Mountain Bicycling Association crews worked with the foundation to lay out an additional ten miles of named routes across the broader park, everything from the North Forty to Founders Valley. That work reshaped the trails circling the hill. It never touched the direct climb to the summit itself, the fire road most locals actually mean when they say "M-Hill": a route with no signage, sections that dead-end unexpectedly, and a reputation for being tough without ever being designed that way on purpose.
That may finally be changing. The Rapid City Journal reported on June 27, 2026 that Cowboy Hill could become home to a formal network of hiking and biking trails, with the most challenging routes concentrated toward the top and more pedestrian paths down below, a different approach than the informal grind riders have described for years.
Whatever it costs to build, a project like that gets paid for the same way every other project on this hill has been paid for since Eddie Larsen set the land aside: out of the foundation's own money, not a city budget line. In 2022, foundation chairman Michael Diedrich told the Rapid City Journal that the board's approach to the park had always been to keep it as undeveloped as possible, saying at the time, "We want to leave it wild, but we also want to make it accessible." A philosophy like that helps explain why the hardest, most direct route up the hill sat untouched for so long even as ten miles of graded trail went in around it.
"You don't have to drive 30 minutes before you can get to a place to ride," Black Hills Bicycles owner Ian Estes has said of Rapid City's in-town trail access, a description that applies to both hills even though the two got there through very different funding paths.
Skyline's Refresh Ran Through a City Budget Line Instead
Across town, Skyline Wilderness Area's most visible change this year came from an entirely different process. The destination signs pointing drivers to Dinosaur Park, unchanged for 35 years, were replaced this spring. Rapid City's Traffic Operations Supervisor Greg Buskerud, who drew the original dinosaur logo back in 1991, designed the new signage himself, and the city unveiled fourteen new signs across key access roads in April 2026, with Mayor Jason Salamun on hand for the announcement.
That signage refresh followed a much bigger public investment: a $3.6 million accessibility renovation to Dinosaur Park itself, funded through Rapid City's capital improvement process and completed in 2024, which added a ramp system so visitors with mobility issues could reach the sculptures at the summit for the first time. None of that required a foundation board to weigh competing priorities. It moved through the same city process that funds street repairs and library additions, because Skyline is city land.
Neither hill did anything wrong by moving at its own pace. But if you are trying to understand why one hill got a brand-new set of signs from a city department this spring while the other is only now talking about a formal trail plan for a climb that has existed since 1912, the answer sits in who owns the ground, not in how much anyone cares about it.
Getting to Each One
The two systems are close enough to confuse but different enough to matter once you know where you are headed.
- Hanson-Larsen Memorial Park (M-Hill / Cowboy Hill): main access from Founders Park off West Omaha Street to the south, with a second trailhead on Thrush Drive off West Boulevard to the north. Named routes include the Cowboy Hill Road fire-road climb straight to the summit, plus Dirk's Draw, the Sunrise Loop, and the Sunset North and Sunset South trails for anyone timing a golden-hour ride.
- Skyline Wilderness Area: access points scattered along St. Cloud Street, Flormann Street, Tower Road, Quincy Street, and Cerro Court, plus lots at Dinosaur Park itself and the Petrified Forest overlook. Named trails include Rollercoaster, Robo Kitty, Pinball, Noodle, Hidden Valley, Hustle Down, and Queen of the Hill, and the network holds one of the city's only dedicated bike-only flow trails.
If you want a fast, twenty-minute loop before dinner downtown, the south end of Hanson-Larsen off Founders Park gets you into switchbacks within a few minutes of parking. If you want a longer ride with more variety in a single afternoon, Skyline's spread of access points off St. Cloud and Flormann lets you start from whichever side of the hill is closest to home. Both systems welcome hikers, runners, and mountain bikers, and both stay open year-round, though wet-weather sections on Skyline's shadier trails tend to hold moisture longer than the drier grades on Cowboy Hill.
What Changes This Fall
None of this means either hill is finished changing. The trail plan reported for Cowboy Hill this summer is still just that, a plan, and the foundation will need to decide how and when to fund actual construction. Skyline's new signage is a smaller, already-completed piece of a longer city investment that started with the accessibility project finished in 2024 and will likely keep going in whatever form the next capital budget allows.
What is worth knowing now, before winter closes in on either hill, is that the ground under your feet on Cowboy Hill and the ground under your feet at Skyline answer to two completely different processes. One moves at the speed of a private board deciding how to spend a limited trust. The other moves at the speed of a city council setting a budget. Both got a piece of attention in 2026. Neither got there the same way.
That kind of detail, who owns what and how decisions actually get made, is the sort of thing that matters just as much when you are thinking about a home near either hill as it does on a Tuesday evening ride. If you are weighing a move near Cowboy Hill, Skyline, or anywhere else in the Rapid City area and want someone who tracks these details street by street, the team at The Kahler Team would be glad to talk it through, starting with a free home valuation whenever you are ready.
