This is where Wild Bill Hickok was shot and killed by assassin Jack McCall on August 2, 1876 in Deadwood, South Dakota.

The No. 10 Saloon is where Hickok had been playing five card draw that day.  He was uncomfortable with his back to the bar (the furthest chair in the photo) and asked another player, Charlie Rich, twice if he could switch seats so his back would be to the wall behind – and twice Rich refused (the chair on the left).

A miner who had lost at cards with Hickok so badly that Wild Bill gave him money to eat, Jack McCall, came in, walked to the bar behind Hickok seeming to ask for a drink, and suddenly without warning pulled his pistol shot Wild Bill in the back of the head, killing him instantly.

Four cards in Hickok’s hand were showing – two black aces and two black eights, forever to be known as The Dead Man’s Hand. (The fifth or hole card was down and is not known.)

McCall was hung for the murder, buried with the noose still around his neck.  Hickok is reverentially interred at Deadwood’s Mount Moriah Cemetery with a large bronze monument immortalizing the single most renowned man for whom the Wild West was named – James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok.  (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #227 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

The inner city of the ancient Silk Road oasis of Khiva has been unchanged for centuries. Surrounding 40ft-high snake walls that writhe around the city have protected it for centuries, enabling defenders to shoot, spear, and pour burning hot oil on attackers from three sides.

Khiva’s labyrinth of narrow lanes adorned with blue and aquamarine tile mosaics is a living museum for you to explore. On the Oxus or Amu Darya River in deepest Central Asia, Khiva was ancient when Alexander the Great seized it in 329 BC.

It survived the depredations of Arabs in the 8^th century, Mongols in the 13^th, Tamerlane in the 14^th. The Khanate of Khiva continued to flourish on the Silk Road until conquered by the Russians in the 19^th. Today in Uzbekistan, it remains as the best-preserved of the ancient oases of the Silk Road, yet unknown to the outside world.

It need not remain unknown to you, however. We were just here two years ago, and will be here again soon. Join us and make Khiva a part of your life.(Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #226 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

We’re on the island of Yap in Micronesia – some 500 miles southwest of Guam and 1,200 miles east of Manila in the Western Pacific. The Yapese have lived here for over 2,000 years, and have maintained their culture and traditions to this day.

Phenomenal navigators in their outrigger canoes, in ancient times they began sailing to Palau over 250 miles south to quarry large sections of limestone and return to stone-chisel them into circles with a hole in the middle (through which world put a long pole for carrying them.

Called Rai, they have been Yap’s currency for two millennia. The ones you see here are typical size but many are much larger, weighing as much as a car. Rai are the world’s biggest money – used not for day-to-day transactions but large ones like a bride’s dowry and wedding party, or a real estate deal.

The Yapese are a proud and peaceful people who live by their code of Respect and Responsibility. They are warm and welcoming to visitors. A 90-minute flight from Guam makes it easy to get here. Spending time with these special people will be life-memorable. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #216 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

June 2002, the Vulture’s Mouth Glacier. In the deepest heart of the Gobi Desert of Mongolia, south of the Flaming Cliffs where Roy Chapman Andrews discovered dinosaur eggs in the 1920s, there is a naked spine of mountains called the Gurvan Saihan. In the Gurvan Saihan there is a deep gorge called Yol Alyn, the Vulture’s Mouth. And in the Vulture’s Mouth, there is a glacier.

It is not a big glacier, the continual ice buildup of a stream that never melts even in the heat of the Gobi summer. Yet it is a glacier nonetheless, thick enough for my son Jackson and I to walk on for more than a mile. The Vulture’s Mouth Glacier is just one of a multitude of extraordinary experiences Mongolia has to offer the explorer. Are you up for exploring it with me next June of 2026? (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #90 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

The architectural wonder of the Hanging Monastery was built on a vertical cliff face by the Tuoba people of Inner Mongolia over 1,500 years ago (in the 490s). Devout Buddhists and brilliant engineers, they defied gravity by inserting huge wooden crossbeams deep into the cliff to suspend the monastery’s temples, shrines, and monks’ living quarters, connected with bridges, corridors, and boardwalks, out into space.

Liao Mongols in the 900s rebuilt and sustained it, and it has been carefully refurbished and restored in the centuries since. While it remains primarily Buddhist with statues and depictions of Sakyamuni (the historical Buddha of 5^th century BC) and Maitreya (the future Buddha), the monks welcome reverence to Taoism and its founder Lao Tzu (4^th century BC), as well as Confucius (551-479 BC). Thus you also see shrines and statues of them like nowhere else.

It is a unique and inspiring experience to be here. We’ll be here again in our exploration of Inner Mongolia. ((Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #116 photo ©Jack Wheeler)

The spectacle takes place in the fall at the May Day Stadium in Pyongyang. I attended in 2010 and 2012. It has to be seen to be believed. You’re looking at 10,000 dancers, acrobats and performers on the stadium floor. The background screen of a rising sun and Korean letters is a “card stunt,” 30,000 students holding colored cards composing it.

The number “65” is for the 65^th anniversary of the surrender of Imperial Japan in World War II (August 15, 1945 – I took this photo in 2010), their Liberation Day (our V-J Day). The snowy mountain depicted below the 65 is Mount Paekdu, where all North Koreans are taught their country’s founder Kim Il-sung defeated the Japanese and won the war (he was actually at a Soviet army camp near Khabarovsk, Siberia at the time).

They are never taught a word about the events a few days prior to their Liberation Day (i.e. Hiroshima and Nagasaki), nor to whom the Japanese surrendered. Hands down, NorkLand is the world’s most bizarre country. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #88 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)