Traveling Huntleys

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

Jake the Dog

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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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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Blue Springs, Missouri to Yankton, South Dakota: Wind, the Nelson-Atkins and the Council at Calumet Bluff

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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.

Glassy still water on Lake Yankton below Gavins Point Dam, Yankton, South Dakota

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.

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Branson, Missouri: The Ozark Plateau, the Bald Knobbers and a Thousand Butterflies

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Last Updated: September 9, 2026

From Eminence we drove west and then south, three hours across the width of the Ozarks, to Branson. Branson sits in the far southwestern corner of Missouri, in Taney County, close enough to the Arkansas line that the Boston Mountains start just over the horizon. It is a town of about 12,000 people that takes in something on the order of nine million visitors a year, and it got that way because of a novel.

Elevated view over a horseshoe bend of the White River seen from Table Rock, Branson, Missouri

The Ozarks cover about 47,000 square miles across southern Missouri and northern Arkansas, which makes them the largest area of high ground between the Appalachians and the Rockies. The highest point reaches 2,561 feet, in Newton County, Arkansas — and it is no longer called Buffalo Lookout. On November 15, 2023, after our visit, the United States Board on Geographic Names renamed it Wahzhazhe Summit, at the request of the Osage Nation’s tribal historic preservation office, which argued that the peak should carry the name of the people who lived on this plateau for 1,300 years before removal rather than the name of a fire tower that used to stand on top of it. We met the Osage a week earlier, at Blue Spring near Eminence, in the name they gave that water.

And “plateau” is the right word, because the Ozarks are not mountains. Nothing collided here and nothing erupted. Around 300 million years ago the continental collision that built the Ouachitas to the south pressed down on the crust, and the Ozark block levered upward in response — a slow seesaw. Everything since has been water cutting down into a broad dome of limestone and dolomite. Which is why the country here reads the way it does — hilly, and full of rivers. The hills are what is left standing between the valleys, not anything that was pushed up. It is also why this is the fourth place in a month where the same soluble rock has run the story, after Mammoth Cave, Bowling Green and Eminence.

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Cumberland Falls, Bowling Green & Hardin, Kentucky: A Corvette in a Sinkhole, Elk on the Prairie and the Mayfield Scar

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Last Updated: September 3, 2026

Hardin was our last westward stop in Kentucky on our way to spring in the Rocky Mountains. From the Red River Gorge to Corbin, it was a couple hour drive in the rain. It was also our last chance to see elk again until the Rockies. Three stops across the width of the state — Cumberland Falls in the east, Bowling Green in the middle, Hardin out on Kentucky Lake — and between them a sinkhole that ate eight Corvettes, a fenced prairie with elk in it, and the scar of one of the worst tornadoes in American history.

Two bull elk grazing on the Elk and Bison Prairie at Land Between the Lakes near Hardin, Kentucky
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