Traveling Huntleys

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

Native American Art

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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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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Mitchell, South Dakota: The World’s Only Corn Palace, Oscar Howe and a Thousand Years of Corn

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Last Updated: September 11, 2026

Mitchell sits on Interstate 90 in the southeastern quarter of South Dakota, about an hour and a half northwest of Yankton, and it is known for exactly one thing: the World’s Only Corn Palace. That claim sounds like small-town bluster. It is literally true, and the reason why turns out to be the most interesting thing about the building.

American white pelicans on the open water of Lake Mitchell, Mitchell, South Dakota

This was the last stop of a long month — Kentucky, Missouri, Iowa and now the eastern edge of the Great Plains — and the weather had not finished with us. Sustained winds over 20 mph with gusts past 50, rain, and nighttime temperatures near freezing. We were still inside the country that produces spring tornadoes and we kept the truck pointed out, ready to move if we had to. That habit is the subject of its own post, Crossing Tornado Country in an RV, and this was the third campground in a row where it earned its keep.

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