Traveling Huntleys

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

Missouri River

Grand Loop Road, Yellowstone: A Stagecoach Road, a Basin That Blew Up and the Head of the Missouri

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Last Updated: October 11, 2026

The Grand Loop Road was not built for cars. Army engineers laid it out for stagecoaches, and for its first decade nobody was allowed to drive an automobile on it at all.

Sandy Huntley at the overlook above Grand Prismatic Spring, Midway Geyser Basin, Yellowstone National Park

It is the figure eight of roughly 140 miles that ties together every major feature in Yellowstone, and driving all of it in one day can take four to seven hours depending on wildlife and traffic. We spent the first part of June 2022 working through it from West Yellowstone, Montana, about an hour and a half from Fishing Bridge. We were last here in the fall of 2020.

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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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