Traveling Huntleys

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

Conservation History

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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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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