Drive along Hilary Lane on a Saturday morning between November and April and you will see the same thing every year: cars lining both shoulders, doors half in the ditch, drivers hiking the last quarter mile to the Golf Dome because the lot ran out of room before they ran out of daylight. Edina park staff counted between 30 and 46 vehicles overflowing onto the road during peak hours, more cars than the shoulder space was built to hold. The lot itself has 58 stalls. It was never enough, and everyone who uses Braemar Park in the winter already knew it.
What most residents did not know, until the orange detour signs went up on Braemar Boulevard this summer, is that the city built the fun part of Braemar Park's expansion two years before it built the infrastructure to support it. The mountain bike trails opened in the summer of 2024. The hiking loops followed. The cross-country ski network got its first real test run this past winter. The parking lot and trailhead that were supposed to make all of it accessible are only now, in the second half of 2026, catching up.
The Trails Came First
The city's new singletrack system, built by Pathfinder Trail Building, opened in phases starting in the summer of 2024. The first release covered 6.7 miles of machine-built trail across three segments that skirt Braemar Golf Course: a northwest loop and a southwest loop, each under two miles and built for beginner and intermediate riders, and a longer east segment running 2.6 miles with intermediate-to-advanced sections and jump lines. A fourth segment on the south end opened in the spring of 2025, bringing the full network to nearly eight miles of trail. Separate pedestrian paths, a little over two miles of them, wind through the wooded sections alongside the bike loops.
This past winter, the park layered a third use on top of the same ground. Braemar's golf course itself became a groomed cross-country ski venue, with a 5k or two-mile loop split between a 12-foot skate lane and a 6-foot tracked classical lane, plus a 4-foot snow-groomed walking path starting from the south end of the lot. It was, according to the city's own trail page, an initial layout being tested for the 2025-2026 season, with no promise of daily grooming and no snowmaking equipment behind it. Fat tire bikers got the run of the mountain bike trails too, except for the black jumpline, and snowshoers were welcome on the soft-surface hiking paths.
By any measure, that is three recreational uses stacked onto a park that was still funneling every one of those users through a 58-stall lot built for a much smaller crowd.
Forty-Six Cars, Fifty-Eight Spots
The mismatch finally got addressed at Edina's March 17, 2026 City Council meeting, where staff presented a plan to expand the Golf Dome lot by 50 spaces and turn part of it into a seasonal pickleball facility during the months the dome sits closed. Park Planner Rachel DeVries told the Sun Current that the original design would have added 10,000 square feet of impervious surface and cleared roughly 50 trees from 25,000 square feet of oak woodland. Staff reworked it into a shared-surface plan instead, trading some of that hard-surface footprint for permanent fencing and temporary netting that lets the same pavement serve as parking in winter and pickleball courts from May through October, starting in 2027. Council Member James Pierce called it a creative solution to get full use of the space, and the council approved a $39,420 tree removal contract the same night to keep the project on its April deadline.
That approval set the year's timeline. Grading and demolition began July 20, 2026. A stretch of Braemar Boulevard closed to through traffic from July 28 into mid-August, with drivers detoured to Valley View Road and the US 169 Frontage Road, and no through access between the frontage road and the Hilary Lane roundabout. By early August, the underground stormwater system was in and crews had moved on to grading the new lot and the adjacent section of Braemar Boulevard, with a trash enclosure, lighting, and EV charging still to come before curbs and final paving close out the project this fall.
What This Buys the Park, Beyond a Bigger Lot
The parking expansion is not just about ending the shoulder-parking problem. It is also being built to serve as the trailhead the bike and hiking network never had, connecting both directly to the mountain bike loops and to the paved path along Hilary Lane that ties into Edina's citywide sidewalk system. A section of the existing hiking trail is closed for the duration of construction and will be reconnected and rerouted once the project wraps this fall, according to updates posted on Better Together Edina.
All of this traces back to a single funding source: the $8.1 million in project money Edina voters approved through a local option sales tax on November 8, 2022, years after the city council had already signed off on the broader Braemar Park master plan in January 2018. The plan itself dates to 2017. In other words, residents approved the concept, then waited five years for the money, then watched the recreational half of the project get built before the access half did.
The pattern extends past parking. A separate 44-acre restoration project along Nine Mile Creek, expanded from an originally planned 31 acres, has been clearing buckthorn and other invasive species since March 2024 to make room for restored oak savanna and wetlands, with 2026 set aside for the intensive work of establishing native plants and beating back regrowth. Volunteers turned out for an Arbor Day event to plant more than 200 trees along the park's Eastern Trail border off Gleason, adding to the canopy that will eventually shade the trails already in use. And the arena at the center of the park, per Better Together Edina's own project list, is slated for a new indoor rink and expanded lobby down the line, meaning the sequence of build-the-attraction-first, build-the-infrastructure-later is likely to repeat again before the master plan is finished.
A Park With a Head Start on Its Own History
None of this is really new behavior for Braemar. The golf course opened in 1964, a year after construction started on what was then a name borrowed from a Scottish village, in keeping with a city founded by Scottish settlers who named it for Edinburgh. Braemar was ranked the number one public course in Minnesota by Golf Digest in 1984, hosted the final Minnesota Golf Classic on the PGA Tour in 1969, and staged the U.S. Women's Amateur Public Links in 1979, all well before the course got its most recent full rebuild. That redesign, by architect Richard Mandell, broke ground in late 2016 and did not reopen until May 2019, more than fifty years after the course first earned its reputation. The Golf Dome that now anchors the winter side of the park has been named among the top 50 in the country by the Golf Range Association of America, another headline achievement that arrived before the surrounding logistics fully kept pace.
At 500 acres, Braemar remains Edina's largest park, home to the golf course, the Golf Dome, Braemar Arena, the Sports Dome and Field, and Courtney Fields. For residents who already treat it as the default place to ride, walk, ski, or watch a game, the practical takeaway for this fall is straightforward: expect the Braemar Boulevard detour to lift once paving finishes, expect the rerouted hiking trail to reopen alongside it, and expect the pickleball courts to stay a 2027 story rather than a this-season one. The trails you have been riding since 2024 were never the unfinished part. The way in was.
If you are watching this corner of Edina for reasons beyond a weekend ride, from schools to street access to how a neighborhood's public investment shows up in its property values over time, that is the kind of on-the-ground read Turnquist Spilseth Real Estate Group builds every local guide around. Reach out when you are ready to talk about what is happening in your corner of Edina.
