Karst Geology

Kentucky Travel Guide: Mammoth Cave, the Bourbon Trail, Red River Gorge and the Land Between the Lakes

September 9, 2026 by Michael Huntley

Last Updated: September 9, 2026

We have crossed Kentucky twice, two years apart, in two different rigs and two very different springs. The first was March 2020, northbound out of Nashville and the Natchez Trace in our Newmar motorhome, arriving at Mammoth Cave the day after the National Park Service cancelled every underground tour in the park. The country was closing behind us as we drove. The second was April and May 2022, a full month in the Airstream with Jake the dog, working west to east and then back again across the whole width of the state — caves, bourbon, sandstone arches, elk, and a tornado scar we did not expect to find.

Kentucky rewards that kind of slow crossing. It is a small state that behaves like several larger ones stacked together, and after eight posts and a month on its back roads, three things kept surfacing. The first is rock. Most of south-central and western Kentucky sits on Mississippian limestone, which water dissolves — that is why the longest cave on earth is here, why springs rise out of hillsides, why creeks vanish into the ground mid-field, and why the floor gave way under the National Corvette Museum in 2014. Push east and the limestone disappears under a hard cap of sandstone that water cannot dissolve, only undercut, and you get the opposite landscape: no caves, but a hundred natural arches and a waterfall that has walked itself upstream for miles.

The second is that a striking amount of Kentucky’s public land was paid for by a private fortune made in something else entirely. Bourbon money bought Bernheim Forest and gave it away. A du Pont chemical fortune bought Cumberland Falls to stop a power dam and handed it to the Commonwealth. Red River Gorge is the variant with no money in it at all — that one was saved by people who simply refused to let it be flooded.

The third is quieter and runs underneath the first two. Somebody paid for these places. Mammoth Cave National Park was assembled by condemnation, and the farms, churches and cemeteries are still in there. Land Between the Lakes was created in 1963 by moving roughly 800 families off a peninsula and leaving 270 cemeteries behind. None of that makes these places less worth visiting. It just means somebody paid for them, and it is worth knowing who.

This guide is organized geographically rather than in the order we drove it, and each section links to the full post — photographs, practical detail and all — for that part of the state.

[Read more…]

Cody, Wyoming: Shell Canyon, Dead Indian Pass and the Argument Over Buffalo Bill’s Body

July 8, 2022 by Michael Huntley

Updated Last: September 20, 2026

In 1948 the Colorado National Guard posted soldiers on a grave. The grave was on Lookout Mountain above Golden, it already had tons of concrete poured over it, and the man in it had been dead for thirty-one years. The soldiers were there because an American Legion post in Wyoming had publicly offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who would go and get him.

Snow-capped peaks of the Absaroka Range west of Cody, Wyoming

Buffalo Bill Cody founded the town of Cody, Wyoming in 1896 and is not buried there, and a good many people in Cody have never entirely accepted it. We used the town as a base, and mostly what we did was drive — over the Bighorns on U.S. 14, up the Chief Joseph Scenic Byway, and on toward a gate into Yellowstone that turned out to be shut.

[Read more…]

Spearfish, South Dakota: The Canyon, the Falls and the Trout That Were Never Here

June 20, 2022 by Michael Huntley

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.

[Read more…]

Custer, South Dakota: Wind Cave, Custer State Park and the Hills That Were Never Sold

June 10, 2022 by Michael Huntley

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

[Read more…]

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

May 19, 2022 by Michael Huntley

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.

[Read more…]

Eminence, Missouri: Blue Spring, Alley Mill and the Country’s First Scenic Riverways

May 14, 2022 by Michael Huntley

Last Updated: September 3, 2026

Eminence is in the center of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways. It’s one of the nation’s first protected waterways — in fact it was the first of them, established in 1964, four years before the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act existed at all. The park encompasses the Current and Jacks Fork rivers. These rivers are known for their clear, calm and cool water which is ideal for swimming, fishing, paddling and tubing. Eminence is a small town, less than 600 people live here. The post office was established in 1844. We knew this because we needed it to mail our taxes on time.

A rainbow over the Jacks Fork River seen from our RV site in Eminence, Missouri

[Read more…]