Traveling Huntleys

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

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Fishing Bridge, Yellowstone: The Bridge Closed to Fishing and the Trout Nobody Invited

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Last Updated: October 10, 2026

Since 1995 the National Park Service has killed more than three million trout in Yellowstone Lake on purpose. It does it with gillnets, from contracted boats, every summer, and the whole point of it is to save a different trout.

Fishing Bridge over the outlet of Yellowstone Lake where the Yellowstone River begins, June 11, 2022, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

Fishing Bridge is where the lake turns into the Yellowstone River, and it is the place where that story is easiest to see. We spent a week here at the end of May and into June 2022, parked in the RV park just east of the bridge, and it snowed on us.

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

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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
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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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North Yellowstone & Gardiner, Montana

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Last Updated: May 25, 2026

We spent a full week in Gardiner, Montana, at the north entrance to Yellowstone National Park. It was the perfect base — a short drive to the entrance gate, and each morning we were greeted by elk and pronghorn antelope right along the road. We explored the park on multiple days, covering the Lamar Valley, Mammoth Hot Springs, Norris Geyser Basin, the Madison River corridor, and more thermal features than we could fit into one visit.

The Lamar River flowing through a wide, green valley with snow-capped mountains in the distance, northern Yellowstone National Park
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