Traveling Huntleys

Inspiring travel stories, tips, and guides from a couple exploring the world one destination at a time.

Michael Huntley

Sheridan, Wyoming: The Eatons’ Horse Drive, the Brinton and Twenty Thousand Horses

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We pulled onto the shoulder of a county road outside Sheridan and about a hundred and twenty-five horses came past us at a walk. Eight riders were working them. The herd had wintered out east of town and had been three days on the trail, and it crossed the pavement, spilled into the fields alongside, came back onto the road, and eventually went straight through the middle of Sheridan to the ranch that had been waiting for it since fall.

A wrangler riding alongside the Eatons horse drive as the herd comes into Sheridan, Wyoming

A hundred and twenty years before that, this same town sold more than twenty thousand horses to the British Army and shipped them to a war in South Africa. Almost everything we did in Sheridan turned out to be a piece of that story, including the art museum and the saddles.

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Buffalo, Wyoming: The Bighorn Mountains, Red Cloud’s War and the Johnson County Invasion

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There were no moose in the Bighorn Mountains. In 1948 the Wyoming Game and Fish Department baited eight of them into a trap in Jackson Hole and drove them across the state on trucks. Eight more followed in 1950, thirteen more in 1974 and 1987, and that is the whole founding population. Twenty-nine animals. Every moose in this range came out of the back of a truck.

A moose grazing below the snow-capped Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming

The town below them has a comparable history. Buffalo sits at the foot of the Bighorns where the United States fought a war against the Lakota and lost it outright, and then, twenty-four years later, came within a morning of a second one between its own citizens.

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Spearfish, South Dakota: The Canyon, the Falls and the Trout That Were Never Here

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Updated: September 13, 2026

Fifteen species of fish are native to the streams of the Black Hills. Not one of them is a trout. Every trout in every creek in these hills — and people drive across the country to fish them — was put here on purpose, and most of them came out of a low stone building a short walk from where we parked the trailer.

Spearfish Falls dropping through the forest, Spearfish Canyon, South Dakota

And the waterfall in that photograph was dry for seventy-two years. It is running again because a mining company put the water back in 1990. Spearfish is a town where almost nothing you are looking at is the way it arrived, and it is a great deal more interesting for it.

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Medora, North Dakota: Theodore Roosevelt National Park and the Two Men of 1883

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Medora sits in the far west of North Dakota, close enough to the Montana line that you can be there in fifteen minutes. Interstate 94 runs along the edge of the plains for hours and then, without much warning, drops into the valley of the Little Missouri River and the country falls apart into buttes and coulees. Medora is down in that hole. Fewer than 150 people live here year round, and the reason anyone comes is the national park on both sides of town.

Banded badlands hills in spring light, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota
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Custer, South Dakota: Wind Cave, Custer State Park and the Hills That Were Never Sold

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Last Updated: September 14, 2026

Two facts sit inside a twenty-mile circle here. The town is named after the officer whose 1874 expedition found gold in these hills and broke the treaty that guaranteed them to the Lakota. And the cave south of it is where, in the Lakota account, people came into the world. You can drive between the two in half an hour.

Dr. Michael Huntley, physician, photographer, artist, among the granite spires of the Needles Highway, Black Hills, South Dakota
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Interior, South Dakota: Badlands National Park, the Stronghold District and a Landscape Halfway Gone

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Last Updated: September 14, 2026

The Badlands are almost exactly halfway through their existence. Water began carving them out of the prairie around 500,000 years ago, and at the current rate of about an inch a year, the Park Service expects them to be gone in roughly another 500,000. Everything in the photographs below is temporary. That is not a melancholy thought so much as a useful one, because it explains why the place looks the way it does — nothing here is hard enough to last.

Dr. Michael Huntley, physician, photographer, artist, and Sandy Huntley on the Badlands Loop Road, Interior, South Dakota
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