Traveling Huntleys

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

Black Hills

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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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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Black Hills, South Dakota

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Last Updated: May 25, 2026

It was a five-hour drive from Colorado to the Black Hills of South Dakota. We rolled through the verdant, grass-covered hills of Colorado and Wyoming, with Jake on the lookout for antelope, prairie dogs, and cattle the whole way. As we crossed into South Dakota, the hills turned pine-covered and the roads grew curvy — prompting plenty of reminders from Sandy to slow down.

The four presidential faces carved into Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Black Hills, South Dakota
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