Traveling Huntleys

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

Mule Deer

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

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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.

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Sheridan, Wyoming: The Eatons’ Horse Drive, the Brinton and Twenty Thousand Horses

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We pulled onto the shoulder of a county road outside Sheridan and about a hundred and twenty-five horses came past us at a walk. Eight riders were working them. The herd had wintered out east of town and had been three days on the trail, and it crossed the pavement, spilled into the fields alongside, came back onto the road, and eventually went straight through the middle of Sheridan to the ranch that had been waiting for it since fall.

A wrangler riding alongside the Eatons horse drive as the herd comes into Sheridan, Wyoming

A hundred and twenty years before that, this same town sold more than twenty thousand horses to the British Army and shipped them to a war in South Africa. Almost everything we did in Sheridan turned out to be a piece of that story, including the art museum and the saddles.

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Medora, North Dakota: Theodore Roosevelt National Park and the Two Men of 1883

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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.

Banded badlands hills in spring light, Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North 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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