Traveling Huntleys

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

Birding

Karnak Temple, Egypt: Amun-Ra, the Great Hypostyle Hall & the Avenue of Sphinxes

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Flying from Cairo to Luxor takes just under an hour, but the journey feels like crossing millennia. Luxor was ancient Thebes — the capital of Egypt’s New Kingdom pharaohs for nearly five centuries — and from the air you can begin to see why they chose it: the Nile cutting a narrow band of green through absolute desert, the cliffs on the west bank where they carved their tombs into the rock, the temples rising on both sides of the river below. Karnak was the first thing on the agenda, and nothing quite prepares you for the scale of it.

Karnak Temple, Egypt
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Fishing Bridge, Yellowstone: The Bridge Closed to Fishing and the Trout Nobody Invited

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Last 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 over the outlet of Yellowstone Lake where the Yellowstone River begins, June 11, 2022, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

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.

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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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