Inspiring travel stories, tips, and guides from a couple exploring the world one destination at a time.
Red Lodge is in central southern Montana almost at the Wyoming border. Coal mining got a start here in 1884. Over the years, tourists replaced miners because of the very scenic Beartooth highway that links Red Lodge with the northeast entrance of Yellowstone National Park.
A flooded and closed Yellowstone is not what we expected for the 150-year anniversary. Spring snow melt followed by a couple of snow storms and a whole lot of rain led to record high water levels.
Last Updated: October 11, 2026
The Grand Loop Road was not built for cars. Army engineers laid it out for stagecoaches, and for its first decade nobody was allowed to drive an automobile on it at all.
It is the figure eight of roughly 140 miles that ties together every major feature in Yellowstone, and driving all of it in one day can take four to seven hours depending on wildlife and traffic. We spent the first part of June 2022 working through it from West Yellowstone, Montana, about an hour and a half from Fishing Bridge. We were last here in the fall of 2020.
[Read more…] about Grand Loop Road, Yellowstone: A Stagecoach Road, a Basin That Blew Up and the Head of the MissouriLast Updated: October 10, 2026
Since 1995 the National Park Service has killed more than three million trout in Yellowstone Lake on purpose. It does it with gillnets, from contracted boats, every summer, and the whole point of it is to save a different trout.
Fishing Bridge is where the lake turns into the Yellowstone River, and it is the place where that story is easiest to see. We spent a week here at the end of May and into June 2022, parked in the RV park just east of the bridge, and it snowed on us.
[Read more…] about Fishing Bridge, Yellowstone: The Bridge Closed to Fishing and the Trout Nobody InvitedUpdated Last: September 20, 2026
In 1948 the Colorado National Guard posted soldiers on a grave. The grave was on Lookout Mountain above Golden, it already had tons of concrete poured over it, and the man in it had been dead for thirty-one years. The soldiers were there because an American Legion post in Wyoming had publicly offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who would go and get him.
Buffalo Bill Cody founded the town of Cody, Wyoming in 1896 and is not buried there, and a good many people in Cody have never entirely accepted it. We used the town as a base, and mostly what we did was drive — over the Bighorns on U.S. 14, up the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway, and on toward a gate into Yellowstone that turned out to be shut.
[Read more…] about Cody, Wyoming: Shell Canyon, Dead Indian Pass and the Argument Over Buffalo Bill’s BodyWe 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 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.
[Read more…] about Sheridan, Wyoming: The Eatons’ Horse Drive, the Brinton and Twenty Thousand Horses