Traveling Huntleys

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

Wyoming

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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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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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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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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Lamar Valley, Mammoth, and Norris Geyser Basin

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Last Updated: July 18, 2026

Lamar Valley from West Yellowstone is over a two-hour drive one way — but every mile of it rewards you with geothermal wonders, wildlife encounters, and sweeping fall scenery. In the past we’ve stayed in Gardiner at the north entrance, which puts Lamar Valley much closer. Along the way, Norris Geyser Basin, Terrace Spring, Beryl Spring, Gibbon Falls, and Mammoth Hot Springs all make excellent stops. Yellowstone National Park — established in 1872 as America’s first national park — never fails to astonish us, and autumn is one of the most magical times to visit.

Golden cottonwood trees reflecting fall foliage along the road to Lamar Valley, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
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