Virtual Park Walk in Montana's Biggest City - Virtual Walking Trails for Treadmill - City Walks - 4K
Mar 17, 2025
#Montana #walkingtour #citywalks #virtualwalk #treadmillworkout #treadmillscenery #virtualtreadmill #Billings
In today's windy virtual walk, we take you back to Billings, Montana and John H. Dover Memorial Park on the east side of town next to the Yellowstone River. There are several city parks along the river and a pedestrian walking / biking trail system, though I'm not sure it reaches all the way out here. We take a virtual hike along the rim and then down into the cottonwoods and out over the cobble to the river then back to the car in our virtual treadmill walk. You will cross a couple of suspension foot bridges and get blown around by the wind a bit. Just before and not long after, incredibly strong winds kicked up and stayed up. They blew over a semi in Livingston (not the first this year) and set records in Billings. They even ripped off a bit of my car as I drove home. We also get a bit of rain.
Virtual walks for treadmill are a great way to burn some calories and anxiety for fitness and calm during quarantine lockdowns. If you have any suggestions for more virtual hikes and walking tours for treadmill in and around Montana, please put them in the comments below. Creating these virtual treadmill walking scenery and walking tours for treadmill is a lot of fun and great exercise but I also get a lot of motivation and joy from your comments so please let me know what you think in the comments section below.
One interesting thing I wanted to point out: This park is actually private land. It was created by the Yellowstone River Parks Association ( YRPA ) and is maintained by them. I just think that's a cool community endeavor.
-Henry
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Virtual treadmill walk video -
These videos are great for treadmill walking scenery. Getting good health at the gym while traveling to different and special virtual locations.
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0:01
hello walkers and welcome to billings montana
0:06
um we are at the john h dover memorial park today
0:12
and it is super windy i'm in the lee a little bit and it's actually calmed down just a tad
0:18
so i don't know how much i'm going to speak i may do some sweetening after the fact in the
0:25
audio department in the post-production it is about one o'clock it's calling for a hundred
0:31
percent chance of rain at two so we're going to go ahead and start walking here uh might get a little wet later but
0:37
hopefully we'll be back to the car uh by the time that kicks in
0:42
it's uh when i say it's one o'clock it's probably i think it's 60 degrees fahrenheit um i'm not sure how that
0:50
translates to uh centigrade let me look that up
0:55
we are on the um east side of billings and uh
1:02
look this up here along and this park is along the yellowstone river it's actually 55
1:09
degrees it's dropped a lot just in the last 10 minutes 13 degrees celsius
1:15
this is one of the newest parks in billings but it's not a city park and it's not a county park as the sign
1:22
entrance says it's the it's owned by the yellowstone
1:28
parks river association and uh it's got all the
1:35
amenities of a public park and it is open to the public during daytime hours but it's privately
1:42
owned which is kind of a neat thing where private interests
1:48
donate public donations have raised money to acquire develop and maintain a public
1:55
space rather than having to go through all the
2:00
necessary steps that a public park would have to go through as
2:06
part of the you know our democracy excuse me so we're gonna walk around um we
2:14
actually i actually found out about this park on a trip with traveling mel much like the recent walk i did over in
2:20
columbus great park if you're ever in billings and need to get the kids out i don't know what the dog
2:27
rules are here for pets but there's it's some easy trails you can see how
2:34
well developed it is i'm go ahead and give you some
2:40
housekeeping here my name is henry i am your proxy walker your virtual travel guide as i take you
2:46
around um this park here and uh
2:52
give me a like a thumbs up if you like it uh if you enjoy this video and if you enjoyed the channel
2:58
subscribe so that you can click that bell so you get notified about new videos when i release them um
3:06
and uh what else oh yeah leave me comments i love getting
3:11
comments and um hearing your thoughts and your connections to these places
3:17
any corrections or additional information is always welcome please keep your comments respectful and
3:24
positive i appreciate that as well as the other viewers and other people that read the comments this is a really cool
3:30
excuse me suspension bridge funded by the harry l willith
3:39
foundation and it's named jim i'm not sure what the story is on that it's kind of a neat thing here great view
3:47
you can hear it creaking i don't know if you can see it moving around under my weight
3:55
i'm going to try and talk throughout this video my voice is getting a little raspy um
4:03
the uh someone recently said i was called me the uh oh geez now i've
4:10
forgotten it anyway i'll tell if i remember it also
4:15
i'll say it later but uh there's a fun comment that i got do enjoy reading your comments
4:21
um i have i did want to mention one thing youtube has this in the in the creator side the
4:28
back end the youtube studio uh they will auto filter out things they
4:34
think are spam or they've all put it under now and you're held for review but i haven't been having issues in that
4:43
nothing appears under my held for review even though i used to get tons of things marked as
4:48
spam that i would then approve because i didn't think they were spam
4:54
and now some of those just aren't appearing at all and then all of a sudden they'll appear
4:59
even though they were put in weeks before or days before so if i
5:05
don't immediately get to your comment um that could be it or maybe i am
5:10
well i'm busy and i haven't had a chance to look at the get online yet that day but i do read
5:17
your comments all the ones that appear for me so please do reach out let me know what you're
5:23
thinking um let me know what you think of these channel
5:28
this channel uh because i i it's it's become one of the
5:36
primary motivations for doing this uh channel you can see they're doing a lot
5:41
of construction over here i don't know what that is um could be a gravel pit
5:47
it could be a subdivision i'm not sure um but look at this great view well there's
5:54
a refinery in the background that's not that great but you've got a creek coming through here and then you've got the river down
6:01
below that out there is mostly not rain
6:07
uh the wind's actually calmed down it was 40 miles an hour the app said but it
6:12
seemed a lot harder could barely uh see because of the
6:17
actual it was dust flying around and uh you it was pretty it's really
6:24
impressive a little eerie a little uh not scary but you know a little thrilling
6:30
excuse me i drove below the rim rock where the airport is and i was thinking wondering how they're
6:36
going to land up in there i guess they're used to that sort of thing
6:43
and you i was thinking you know the wind out here in the prairie because livingston they the wind blew over a uh semi this
6:49
morning on the highway uh every year there's two or three of those that get to try and think they know better than
6:56
the highway authorities and try to press their luck to save a few minutes
7:03
and over they go but uh i was thinking you know this wind
7:10
out here in the prairies and i had read something i think it was a book about ideas or
7:16
something anyway it was um a it had a section about teepees and how
7:23
the teepee which is the portable abode of traditional boat of planes
7:30
indians in the uh plains native peoples here in the americas is actually a fairly
7:39
[Music] fairly circumpolar if you will
7:45
design that sort of originated where they think is a development from
7:51
the in places that have huge winds so they have a version of a tp up in the tundra
7:59
they have various types of tvs around different parts of the planes
8:04
all of which they think or adapted to deal with the wind because it's
8:10
they've done tests where they it's uniquely um i don't know uniquely but it's it's
8:16
very well constructed to handle wind and to insulate and to not just just not
8:23
blow over and you can see why they would need that
8:30
in a place like this i'm going to zip up this because it's clanking around sorry for
8:36
the audio issue here i'm gonna try to get that sorted
8:43
maybe maybe that'll stick there for a second maybe not um
8:50
anyway that's one of the things i was thinking about today another thing i was thinking about
8:57
was when i was looking on the map and this doesn't show up as a
9:02
like a green section on google maps because it's not a city or county park or maybe because they just haven't
9:08
done that yet it just shows up as as if it were private land which it is
9:15
but it is again open to the public and it's however there are a couple other parks
9:20
as you look back two moon park which that might be those trees all those willows down there
9:27
um not sure uh hold on here gonna drop pan google
9:33
situation come on google you can do it
9:38
um anyway um i'm trying to find the names
9:46
of the parts here
9:51
and now i can't two moon park and
10:00
colson park that was it and between some of those parks there's a lot of uh seems to be and i don't know the extent
10:07
of them some bike paths jogging paths walking paths which is really cool
10:12
infrastructure for a community to have in my opinion
10:18
we've got a pit toilet a second pit toilet here at the far end of the park i don't know exactly where the borders
10:24
are but it looks like there's a path over here so we're gonna go explore what that's all about
10:30
although it might be private property and what looks like uh art might just be
10:36
junk i the hul the holder i guess
10:46
again i apologize for the audio if it sounds muffled or a lot of wind noise um
10:54
it's under two the microphone's under at least one jacket
11:00
and that's going to lead to some extraneous noise as a
11:06
price of getting out of the wind oh this looks like an old plow
11:13
and a sign up here see some old rims and stuff
11:19
little blades kinda neat
11:30
this is called lois's point looks like a poem
11:39
oh look and they're making i forgot they were making a bridge down here i think i think that's what they're doing uh
11:45
that's what this all this must be another access point from i-90 which is
11:52
i'll be honest here a little bit of a shame to have this natural area and have a highway but you know
11:59
people have to get around and we always have to make compromises as we develop our public
12:08
spaces see the gray clouds that it was sunny
12:15
just 30 minutes ago
12:21
it's really kind of blowing the camera around too super windy
12:28
zoinks
12:36
little rabbit don't get them too scared sorry to whip
12:42
around like that but i wanted to show you a little friend kind of startled me
12:54
[Music]
12:59
little picnic table up here for days when it's not quite so windy
13:05
and uh we've got a interpretive sign for birds of the riparian zone here
13:19
i've probably said this before but the yellowstone river is the longest undammed river
13:27
in the lower 48
13:32
with the small caveat that there is a big diversion dam downstream but it's not a true dam
13:42
whatever that means
13:48
so hopefully you can still hear me here
13:59
i'm going to cut down here i don't think this is an actual trail and probably contributing a little bit
14:05
to erosion my apologies i'm hoping we'll get a little bit out of the wind if we can get
14:10
down here in the base
14:21
[Music] i guess my point before that wind sort of really
14:29
came up no idea hear me or not um was that uh
14:37
it'd be interesting to see you can see the willow those big logs up there cottonwood trees willow trees
14:46
those get swept down every year during high water runoff and be interesting to see this
14:54
section this area at that time water probably comes up into these other lower
15:00
cottonwoods at times during really high water
15:11
maybe we'll go down there real quick and that looks like we got battery and
15:18
length of card i think i mentioned my last one i got a new card i'm kind of excited about
15:23
256 gigabytes that uh it should be enough for five hours
15:29
almost five hours of recording time now obviously we're not going to do that much today
15:35
but before i had these 64 good cards and they would do about one and a half
15:43
walks which is not enough whereas this will do uh should do five or six
15:49
uh i've only the most walks i've ever done in a day is five and i was pretty tired after that
15:58
done it a couple times but you know you're doing i have a fitbit and
16:06
i get like end up getting 20 25 000 steps which i think it's like 10 to 12 miles
16:15
look at these cliffs kind of cool in this beautiful color golden grasses
16:22
love it
16:39
i think that uh that's a little bit much of a drop for me maybe we'll find another access point
16:44
down here [Music] uh billings of course i've said this and
16:52
other things but i'll say it again is one of the biggest cities in montana it's
16:57
a little i think it's a hundred some odd thousand people apparently they've got more hotel rooms
17:03
here than the most hotel rooms within four states i don't know exactly how they're
17:09
measuring that but it's a convention center an economic center for the state in the region
17:15
big oil and gas processing here feels my first raindrop
17:22
and then a lot of banking and other commercial type stuff the uh a lot of great restaurants
17:28
actually they're downtown's really coming back so check out a couple of those walks that i've done if you're feeling up to it
17:36
and it's really kind of a cool town for a long time it i think it had a rough an era of
17:45
rough times but uh i'm it's we've started coming over here
17:50
a little bit more and we really like it it's a great place to stop if you're on a road trip
17:58
and then you've got a good they call it montana's trailhead is their marketing slogan
18:04
and it really kind of is a great place you can head north to the plains and like the central
18:11
montana area you can go to the american prairie reserve over to glacier or you can go south to
18:16
yellowstone cody's within reach bozeman's a couple hours away
18:23
and of course you've got a lot of great things to do locally a lot of like
18:30
stuff for families to do too trampoline parks climbing gyms water slides got a great cabela's store
18:38
here rei and then a lot of
18:43
other things so it's a cool place to come and visit and a lot of great breweries we love
18:51
a good brewery it's i don't know if you can see but there's lots of raindrops
18:59
on the rocks down here
19:04
but it's not really raining that hard yet i think i told you 100 chance at 2 p.m
19:11
so we'll see how accurate that weather forecast is
19:17
i can kind of see a line of rain coming i guess it's kind of already here
19:26
but we'll come down to the water before we head back and then we've got a whole other half of
19:31
the parks to look at so stay with us i like this this is kind of a nice gentle
19:38
stretch of river you got a little bit of a riffle over here we have been actually our family
19:45
starting to think about what rivers we want to float on our raft this year and we're getting kind of
19:52
excited about that one things i kind of like to do i think some of our friends had mentioned
19:58
is to do some of these lower sections we're we're we float paradise valley a lot
20:03
um but it'd be fun we were thinking or one of them suggested floating from gardiner down to big
20:10
timber on a multi-day float i think that's probably
20:16
120 or more miles so depending on what time of year you do
20:22
it it could uh it could be a problem
20:28
i mean it's not a problem it could be a long time or it could be a few days
20:34
several lots of people have floated from the park boundary all the way to where it joins the
20:40
missouri over north dakota and that apparently takes about 30 days
20:48
we're not going to take that long and honestly rafting from
20:55
much further east in here down here comes the rain that would be quite the challenge i'm
21:01
going to swing over here and just show you these this little creek and these rocks and cold bluffs again
21:08
we'll continue on you can see how high up this says navigation restriction ahead referring to that dam
21:14
they put it up here because of high water i assumed
21:20
hopefully we won't get too much rain drops on the screen
21:28
but i can't make too many promises because i'm actually going to be walking back into the wind
21:35
excuse me as we go
21:46
it's like a lot of clay deposits i'm actually gonna see if i can adjust
21:51
this microphone
21:56
my apologies again come on
22:09
hopefully oh that's not going to do it
22:14
fell right off take a look you can see that bridge down there as i try to
22:20
clip this on and move up multiple layers again my apologies for
22:28
that brief uh technical fix
22:35
you can hear how more muffled how much more muffled it is i'm under another layer of jacket it's
22:42
not particularly cold but i'm just trying to keep you from having to listen to the wind there
22:50
and see the uh hear the popping of the rain on my jacket
22:55
as well
23:01
hopefully this the lens isn't getting too wet i've cut my hand over it but the lens of
23:08
these gopros are so wide it's hard to do that without getting in
23:14
the frame and that's actually one of the reasons i like the gopro is the wide angle just especially in tight cities like
23:22
in europe where you got these narrow narrow streets or big tall buildings here in the u.s you just get a much
23:30
better view than the narrower lenses of like a phone
23:35
without an adapter or the original osmo the osmo pocket 2 apparently has a wider
23:43
lens pretty close to this as well as an adapter i don't have one of those yet
23:53
up ahead on that hillside you can see the bridge we went over they called jim and
24:00
i think the other one was gina there's two spans uh i assume that has to do with sponsors or
24:07
memorials it's kind of fun but this is a great little park in this
24:13
bottomland and uh you know it's just nice to have
24:19
access to nature even in a well what we in montana would call big city most people would call a
24:24
small town to have access to this yellowstone
24:31
river have access to a little natural space where you can
24:36
watch birds and see plants and just let the anxieties of your day
24:42
fade away so kudos to the yellow yellowstone river parks association
24:49
and to the community of buildings this one's named lisa hold on i'm going to wipe away a droplet
24:58
try to there we go
25:04
a nice little creek
25:14
and i think i can't remember which way i go here
25:20
i think maybe i can go either way let's try either way there's another solid bridge off to the
25:28
right but we're going to go this way
25:36
if i had time or maybe another day when they open it back up but
25:41
east of here is a national park or reserve or historical point
25:48
called pompei's pillar pompey being the son of sacagawea sacagawea
25:55
on the lewis and clark expedition and there is some stone etchings
26:03
of one of the i can't remember which one but from the expedition either lewis or clark or both
26:11
on the sandstone there and a great little walk up to the top of this sort of
26:20
small spur rock spur overlooking the river it's really kind of a cool place with a
26:25
neat little interpretive center it's another great place to stop
26:31
if you're traveling through montana i think i can't remember if that's after 1990
26:39
splits into 1994 or if it is after
26:49
little christmas decorations
26:59
[Music] there's a statue of a longhorn cow upon the horizon you probably can't see in
27:04
this wide angle but it's reminding me that uh
27:11
that uh maybe it's a real cow next to a fence
27:18
it's silhouetted so i can't really tell um there's some longhorns down in paradise
27:23
valley that i've been wanting to film they're really impressive they've got
27:28
these just massive uh horns the horns are just so so wide
27:37
it's hard to imagine how those could be useful but they were apparently
27:50
we're gonna come down here and cross the creek again before we loop back hopefully we'll be
27:57
in the lee of this hill a little bit here comes some more rain not too bad
28:04
though phone says it's 135
28:15
it's a little weird to be in montana in january and have it be raining and
28:22
not snowing pretty unusual i'm gonna wipe this lens again
28:28
sorry about that
28:45
it's interesting how they've named all these bridges there seems to be a name up here as well this isn't a swinging bridge but uh our
28:52
suspension bridge
28:57
and i have to give them kudos for the maintain the maintenance of this it's
29:03
really well maintained really well laid out really accessible which is nice
29:08
this is donette
29:24
d-o-n-n-e-t-t-e
29:35
i was looking at real estate prices just because they've been going crazy in montana recently and i think billings
29:41
has gone up but it hasn't gone up by the crazy amounts that places like bozeman have
29:51
nor has columbus where i was earlier
30:00
[Music] again if you have any connection to
30:06
billings or this park or you have any additional information that i missed or things that i should have shown please
30:13
feel free to let me know in the youtube comments i say youtube comments
30:19
because i've partnered with this other couple guys to put up a
30:25
amazon fire tv channel and a roku channel
30:31
that is up but it's not i'm not putting up new videos for some reason they haven't gotten that
30:37
quite figured out yet uh but there are a bunch of videos on there
30:42
and if i say the comments below people people on those venues
30:50
you wonder how they're supposed to do that channels are the same name citywalks if
30:56
you're looking for them or if you want to watch new tv you can also just go to the youtube app
31:02
on those services pretty sure amazon has one as well as i know roku does i know most
31:09
smart tvs do it's a crazy technical world these days
31:21
i think even live sports is going online now so
31:27
cable other than providing access to internet cable tv is
31:32
kind of cratering these days
31:39
we'll go up here and we'll see the flag and how it's really whipping around up here you
31:45
can see the blue sky is coming back that's good it's very welcome at least while i'm
31:52
outside the car [Music]
31:58
this is a great little park and uh we were turned on to it by
32:04
the folks at visit billings when we did some work with them
32:09
and uh we were spent the night downtown great night come out here in the morning
32:16
get the kids running around then go to a museum or a you know trampoline park or
32:24
something like that or the zoo the zoo i mean for it's a little zoo but
32:29
they've done a great job with it and it's uh kind of all about they focusing on
32:35
animals that would live at this degree of latitude
32:42
with a few exceptions inside so they don't have elephants or hippopotamuses or
32:50
penguins but they have red pandas wolves bison
32:55
some antelope they've got a couple grizzly bears wolverines mountain goats bigger bighorn sheep
33:03
and uh and something else that i'm omitting there
33:10
some eagles of course um that's really cool and they've got a botanical garden
33:16
they've got otters they just did get a sloth that's one of their inside things they have a small
33:22
thing with some tropical birds and reptiles and i think i assume the sloth lives
33:28
inside as well anyway that doesn't really have anything to do with this park but it's just another reason to come hang
33:36
out in buildings or to stop if you're on a road trip across the country
33:42
all right we calling birds at dover park uh you can look that up uh i want to
33:48
thank you guys for joining us this is a shorter walk well i don't know 30 some odd minutes that's not too bad
33:54
show you this flag if the wind picks up again
34:01
give us a like if you like it thumbs up icon and then uh click that bell to get
34:07
notified about new videos and uh and subscribe and then also just leave
34:15
us a comment i love those comments can't say that enough it really is rewarding to hear that these are helpful to people
34:22
or that you're enjoying them or to get new information or a gentle correction from time to time
34:29
is welcome i want to make sure these are as good as they can be for you guys i can't please
34:34
everybody but i will try to please as many of you as i can so we will see you again very soon hang
34:40
in there everybody i know times are tough but we can do it together so we'll see you next time until then
34:48
keep on stepping
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