By late August the pattern at Spanish Peaks starts to shift in ways only people who live here would notice. The tee sheet at the Weiskopf course still fills early, but the after-work rounds are thinning out as the light goes sooner. Up the hill past Montage, a construction fence has wrapped the site where ASPIRE Lodge is rising, timber framing now visible against the tree line near the Lewis and Clark chair. Cortina's patio chairs come in a little earlier each night. It looks, on the surface, like the valley is settling into its quiet shoulder season before ski season takes over the conversation.
It isn't, not this year. The biggest food and wine event Big Sky has ever attempted lands in four weeks, and while the headlines are calling it a Town Center story, a piece of it is happening inside the club's own front door.
The Arena Gets the Tent. The Clubhouse Gets the Chefs.
The inaugural Big Sky Food & Wine Festival runs September 24 through 26, and most of the press has focused on where the crowds will actually gather: the Grand Tasting Tent at the Big Sky Events Arena in Town Center, where nearly 50 Michelin-starred restaurants and roughly two dozen award-winning winemakers will pour and plate for the general ticket holders. That's the version of the festival most visitors will experience, and it's a legitimate draw. Founder JD Hock, a former tech executive who co-founded Bozeman's Alpenglow Music Festival, has described the event's origin as almost accidental. He pulled a list of thirty restaurants, sent some emails, and had fifteen replies by Monday.
What the arena coverage leaves out is the second layer of the weekend: a run of intimate, ticketed chef dinners scattered across six of Big Sky's most exclusive venues. Of those six, two are happening inside Spanish Peaks, at Montage Big Sky.
On Friday, September 25, chef Roberto Alcocer of Valle in Oceanside, California hosts a dinner at Montage. On Saturday, September 26, chef Wei Chen leads an omakase night at Backcast, the resort's own bar and grill, tucked at the base of the mountain inside the club. The other four marquee dinners land elsewhere in the valley: an opening night BBQ at The Barn, an Akira Back and Ming Tsai collaboration at One&Only Moonlight Basin, a Nancy Silverton and Marc Forgione night at Tips Up, and closing ceremonies at Buck's Roadhouse. Here's how the lineup breaks down.
| Dinner | Featured Chef(s) | Venue | Where It Sits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opening Night BBQ | John Bates, Ming Tsai, Francesco Martinelli, and others | The Barn | Big Sky |
| Friday chef dinner | Roberto Alcocer (Valle) | Montage Big Sky | Spanish Peaks |
| Akira Back + Ming Tsai dinner | Akira Back, Ming Tsai | One&Only Moonlight Basin | Moonlight Basin |
| Big Night | Nancy Silverton, Marc Forgione | Tips Up | Big Sky |
| Saturday omakase | Wei Chen | Backcast, Montage Big Sky | Spanish Peaks |
| Closing Ceremonies | Festival chefs | Buck's Roadhouse | Big Sky |
Two out of six isn't a coincidence tied to Montage's kitchens being convenient. It's a signal about which properties in this valley the festival organizers see as worth building a night around, and Spanish Peaks made that short list twice.
What This Means If You Already Have a Standing Reservation at Cortina
For anyone who already treats Cortina, Alpenglow, or Backcast as neighborhood restaurants rather than resort amenities, this changes the calculus on the festival entirely. The general public buying weekend passes has to plan a trip to the Events Arena, navigate parking, and work around a 21-and-over gate policy. If you're already inside Spanish Peaks, two of the festival's marquee dinners are happening at a restaurant you can walk or shuttle to on any normal Tuesday.
That contrast gets sharper when you look at where the valley's other big culinary headline landed this year. M by The Alinea Group, the Grant Achatz-led restaurant that drew national attention during its debut season, is returning for a second winter run from December 10, 2026 through April 3, 2027, with reservations opening September 24. That residency sits at Big Sky Resort's Village Center, not at Spanish Peaks. For once, the marquee dining news doesn't require driving over to Mountain Village. This September, the traffic runs the other way.
The Rest of the Calendar Moves at a Different Speed
Not everything happening around the club this fall is a headline event. Some of it is slower and more structural, which is its own kind of news if you're the one living next to it.
ASPIRE Lodge is the biggest physical change on the property right now. The 28,000-square-foot mass timber building, sited just upslope from Montage near the Lewis and Clark chair, is under active construction and will eventually house a new restaurant and bar, a pizza kitchen, a fitness studio, a climbing wall, two pools, and flexible event space built into a gateway for the trail and ski network. No completion date has been announced. What residents will notice in the meantime is the construction footprint itself: more equipment, more staging, and a stretch of trail access that looks different than it did last summer.
Golf is winding toward its own seasonal stop. Big Sky Resort's public course closes for the summer on Sunday, September 27, giving the valley a clean, dated marker for when the broader golf season turns over. Private courses in this part of Montana have historically stretched a few weeks longer, often playing into mid-October before the greens get put to bed until spring. That gives members at the Weiskopf course and Tom's Ten, the ten-hole par-3 that debuted in 2024, a real window left this year, but not an open-ended one.
The color is arriving on a similarly compressed timeline. Regional forecasts point to Big Sky's higher elevations starting to turn in mid-September, with peak color typically landing in the last week of September into early October depending on how the weather cooperates. That means the same three-week stretch carrying the festival's marquee dinners is also the stretch when the aspens along the club's trail system are doing their most interesting work, and when the golf season is making its final turn before winter conversations take over completely.
None of these threads are dramatic on their own. Together they describe a neighborhood that spends late summer looking quiet from the outside while quietly hosting some of the more interesting things happening in Big Sky this year, on its own grounds, on its own restaurants' patios, before the snow makes the calendar simple again.
Just last month, the Spanish Peaks Community Foundation held its own clubhouse fundraiser on July 25, a reminder that the giving side of the community calendar runs on the same property as the golf and the dinners. It's a smaller story than a Michelin dinner, but it's the same pattern: things that matter to this neighborhood tend to happen inside it rather than somewhere you have to drive to find them.
If you're weighing what a fall or winter here actually looks like day to day, from restaurant rhythms to trail access during construction seasons, the Spanish Peaks neighborhood page has more detail on the property itself. And if you have questions about how this stretch of the calendar affects a specific address, whether that's proximity to the ASPIRE construction zone or reciprocal access while a course transitions to shoulder season, Callie Pecunies knows this club well enough to answer them plainly.
