Traveling Huntleys

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

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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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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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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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Louisville, Kentucky: Bourbon Distilleries, Cave Hill and a City I Used to Live In

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Last Updated: August 6, 2026

Louisville sits on the Ohio River and is the largest city in Kentucky. It was founded in 1778 by George Rogers Clark and named after King Louis XVI of France, in thanks for French support during the Revolution. It exists because of the Falls of the Ohio — a two-mile run of rapids that was the only major obstruction on the whole river between Pittsburgh and the Gulf of Mexico. Everything going downstream had to stop and portage, and a settlement grew up around the interruption. That is Louisville.

Kentucky offers something for everyone: outdoor recreation, caves, lakes, state parks and the Appalachian Mountains, plus a heritage built on horses, bourbon and moonshine. For me it is also personal. I did my anesthesiology residency in Louisville and stayed on for a year as an associate professor of anesthesiology at the University of Louisville, teaching mostly cardiothoracic anesthesia and pain medicine. I miss the place and the people I met there. In the end the weather is what moved me to San Diego — but Louisville will always have a piece of me.

Cherry Blossoms, Kentucky
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Land Between the Lakes, Kentucky: Bison, 270 Cemeteries and the Town That Was Erased

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Last Updated: August 3, 2026

Land Between the Lakes is a National Recreation Area in western Kentucky and Tennessee. The area is formed by Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley, which run parallel to each other for more than 50 miles. Lake Barkley, 58,000 acres, was formed by Barkley Dam impounding the Cumberland River, completed in 1966 by the Army Corps of Engineers. Kentucky Lake, 160,000 acres, was formed by Kentucky Dam impounding the Tennessee River in 1944, a TVA project and still the largest artificial lake by surface area in the eastern United States. At Grand Rivers the two come within about a mile of each other and are joined by a canal, which means a boat can pass from one river system to the other. The 170,000 acres left standing between them make up the largest inland peninsula in the country. It is very popular for water sports, hunting, fishing, mountain biking and hiking. From Cave City, Kentucky it was about a two-and-a-half hour drive.

Sunset over Lake Barkley, Kentucky
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