Coyotes are the most abundant canine in Yellowstone National Park. They are intelligent and adaptable animals, and they can be found throughout the park, in a variety of habitats.
Coyotes, Deer, Bighorn Sheep-Yellowstone
Deer
Medora, North Dakota: Theodore Roosevelt National Park and the Two Men of 1883
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.
Interior, South Dakota: Badlands National Park, the Stronghold District and a Landscape Halfway Gone
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.
Blue Springs, Missouri to Yankton, South Dakota: Wind, the Nelson-Atkins and the Council at Calumet Bluff
Last Updated: September 11, 2026
This was a week governed almost entirely by the weather. We left Branson and ran north up the Missouri River valley in three hops — an hour to Springfield for an Airstream repair, then Blue Springs outside Kansas City, then Onawa in western Iowa, then Yankton, South Dakota, on the river below Gavins Point Dam. Rain cut Kansas City short. Iowa gave us three days of steady thirty-mile-an-hour wind with gusts to sixty. And the whole route was shaped by wanting to stay out of the way of spring storms on the Plains.
That is Lake Yankton at the end of it, flat as a sheet of glass, three days after we had been building windbreaks out of the truck in Iowa. If you want the argument for why we planned our travel the way we did for nine years, this week is the whole thing in miniature — and it is written out properly in Crossing Tornado Country in an RV.
It is also where the spring finally caught us. We had been traveling inside the bloom since Florida, moving north at roughly the pace the season moves. By the time we reached the Missouri there were Canada geese with goslings on the bank and wild turkeys displaying in the campground, which is the point at which you stop arriving early and start arriving on time.
[Read more…] about Blue Springs, Missouri to Yankton, South Dakota: Wind, the Nelson-Atkins and the Council at Calumet BluffPigeon Forge & the Great Smoky Mountains, Tennessee: Waterfalls, Mingus Mill and Snow in April
Last Updated: August 3, 2026
Pigeon Forge is a year-round tourist town in the western foothills of the Smoky Mountains — shows, shopping, bars, restaurants, go-karts, hiking, watersports, and the mountains themselves. There are simply too many things to see and do in a week. It is also the front door to the most visited national park in the United States, which is the reason we came, and the strip out front turns out to be a genuinely useful thing to have when the weather in the park goes sideways.
Predators & The Wild Side of The Crosby, Rancho Santa Fe, California
Living at The Crosby means sharing the neighborhood with a lot more than golfers. Our home sits on the edge of San Diego County preserve land that stretches back hundreds of acres toward Lake Hodges — and the wildlife doesn’t pay much attention to property lines. Some of it is spectacular. Some of it requires snake fencing.
