Leopards, cassowaries and gibbons – Oh my: The Nashville Zoo

It took almost 20 years for me to just visit the Nashville Zoo. In my Nashville years, I never went to the zoo just for the zoo. 

I ran the Zoo 5K three times, and in 2015 work had a summer event on the elephant pavilion (the zoo no longer has elephants). 

Meg and I changed that one Sunday morning. The parking garage and ponds were new since my last visit. An AZA reciprocity benefit from my Pueblo Zoo membership earned me half-price admission.

The zoo was not too crowded yet, but as we left you could feel a crush of people massing as the alcohol stations opened and the live music began. At least we were there early enough to hear the gibbons sings before contemporary country blotted out everything else. 

Well-forested and with numerous creeks and waterways, the zoo is more of an immersive experience despite being along the city’s busy Nolensville Pike corridor. 

These days, many zoos specialize in specific species. The Nashville Zoo remains best-known for its clouded leopards, having had 50 births at the zoo as part of its species survival/captive breeding program. One enclosure housed two younger leopards, while adults sat among high branches of another. The teenagers played vigorously, one ready to pounce at the other’s swooshing tail. 

At one point a walkway looks down upon a cassowary, the flightless dinosaur bird from Australia. Their colorful head crests and black-feathered torsos make them a delightful sight, but they also boast feet with sharp talons. A kicking cassowary is a dangerous encounter. 

While the elephants have passed away and their pavilion has been repurposed, Nashville’s zoo has other large zoo stalwarts. Rhinos and giraffes roamed separate yards. The lions and tigers were mostly obscured in the foliage of their exhibits. Others took advantage of exhibits hemmed by high netting, such as the red-ruffed lemurs and various species of monkeys. The Andean bears also lounged high in the trees. 

The big veterinary center at the top of the zoo holds the one creature no one wanted to miss. On this Sunday, Azi the clouded leopard cub. At two-month-olds, Azi played vigorously in her habitat, much like a house kitten, although she was already much larger. Shortly after our visit, another leopard was born and will debut in late summer. 

Due to the work of the Nashville Zoo, the species is thriving in captivity. These new lives give you hope that same development might occur in the wild someday. In the meantime, there's another clouded leopard cub to visit.  

Rest easy, friend

As wildfires rage around Colorado, my friend Patrick’s memory is never far away. 

During our years working together, he told about growing up outside Woodland Park, riding his bike through the woods on that high ground, and the house surviving the 2003 Hayman Fire by just a few feet. Outside the fire, he made it sound like a beautiful way to grow up, before such mountain landscapes became exclusive to the wealthy. Endless woods, where a kid could roam and rarely find trouble. 

Patrick left this life in April 2026, far too soon at age 36. I won’t get into the details. Some of them should seem obvious as I talk through this loss. I met six years ago at the corner liquor store, behind a mask during the pandemic. He struck me as strange in a good way. Some nights I was happy to see him working because I knew an interesting conversation awaited me. Other nights the conversation was just odd, but never in a bad way. 

Years later I took on some hours at the same store. Working at a small retail location with another person often leads to good friends – it has in my life, at least. 

On many nights, he made the shift go faster. Patrick was known to put on Christmas music in July or put on a playlist of thunderstorm recordings just to get a rise out of the customers. 

Patrick was on a roll when I met him, headed toward a big life changes. He seemed optimistic and bullish on the change. 

When the change didn’t happen, he changed. He withdrew and grew manic and wild-eyed at times, his even-keel personality vanishing. He just wanted to leave Colorado Springs. 

He moved to Michigan for a fresh start. The fresh start never took hold. Years later, people still asked about him. We heard news about him periodically, none of which boded well for him escaping his rut. 

You think about what could have happened to stop this ending, but there’s a slow motion trainwreck element. I witnessed the turmoil in his personal life take over the good, kind man. He was such a fixture in our part of Colorado Springs that people always asked about him.  

In late June, we found out the man who grew up on Colorado mountainside walked into the Michigan woods one last time. Circumstances demanded the delay in official news. 

The moment I heard, my legs grew weak and buckled. All of us who wanted to seem him rally and saw the good in him were crushed. No more fresh starts.

Not everything in last months in Colorado felt bleak. Despite my concerns, I hoped he would get past the end of the relationship and landed on better footing. 

Endings often hurt, but the wounds become scar tissue. They have for me, and endings have led to beginnings and hopes for better days. I hoped he might get there too. 

There was a good night in Fall 2023, when it seemed as if he might find his path again. We went to see Queens of the Stone Age and acted like a couple of teenagers when we knew which opening riff was coming. After we sounded out the opening to My God is the Sun, we broke out laughing. 

The good feelings of that night did not last. As his demons grew stronger, I lost touch – the man I knew did not appear much anymore before he moved. That he felt this tortured makes me hope some peace reached him in the end, even if his departure brings no peace to those still living. I find it best not to dwell on the sad end. Whether avoidable or not, it happened. 

With Patrick, I’ll remember the quirky but gentle soul playing air guitar on a late summer lawn, the guy who always made a trip to the liquor store better through his unique personality.

Devotcha around the corner

With a blast of trumpet from the audience, Devotchka was not subtle about beginning its April show at the Black Sheep in Colorado Springs.  

Devotchka's eclecticism seems innately suited to their homebase of Denver. The crossroads on the edge of the Rocky Mountains, the last stop before the terrain gets tricky, fits music that's hard to pin down. 

They gained wider recognition after their album How It Ends formed the backbone of the Little Miss Sunshine soundtrack. a little movie that has aged quite well. 

As for Devotchka, the band can never escape that legacy. They will always be intertwined with Little Miss Sunshine. For the movie’s 20th anniversary, they embraced it, even if singer/guitarist/theremin player Nick Urata said they planned to use those songs as an engine to bring new material on the road. 

But the Little Miss Sunshine connection was the draw for many. I spotted my neighbors, as well as someone once I knew and had no desire to acknowledge. My neighbors were excited for the LMS songs and would have been happy if Devotchka just played the soundtrack. But the high quality of the music, the diversity of instruments and how they build their songs makes almost everything they perform interesting to an audience. They’re a band of multi-instrumentalists who manage to never seem gimmicky. 

I already mentioned Urata. Jeannie Schoeder plays upright bass, a tuba wrapped in blue lights, and the flute. Tom Hagerman primarily plays the violin (with a lot of swift pizzicato passages), as well as accordion and piano. Shawn King mostly drums but adds another instrument or two as necessary. 

For Devotchka, everything comes back to the 2004 album How it Ends, which formed the core of the soundtrack for Little Miss Sunshine (and prevented the soundtrack from receiving an Oscar nomination since it was previously released music). 

How it Ends is an album of varied moods, and my favorite arrives on The Enemy Guns. Driven by a grungy, percussive guitar and whistling, it shapes the Hoover family’s last desperate stretch through L.A. before reaching the pageant. It should come as no surprise that they are friendly with Calexico, another favorite, and opened for them at Denver’s Leavitt Pavilion back in June 2022.  

Like almost every song, the percussive and horn-heavy We're Leaving would fit any southwestern roadtrip.   

How it Ends opens the movie, as Olive repeatedly watches videos of beauty queens being crowed. The prominence of minor keys and inherent sadness in these songs always fit the movie perfectly, as the family barely holds it together through all their struggles and losses. Yet in the center is a blissfully oblivious young girl who still has hopes, and that pushes the family onward. 

The melancholy strumming that begins You Love Me has a painful yearning that loses none of its potency live. Quickly the music swelled into the more expansive sound that is the core of Devotchka. 

Urata even pointed out that they brought the toy piano down from Denver, which meant that the breakup song Too Tired was coming. 

The eclecticism will always keep drawing me to Devotchka. Perhaps I have heard the songs live before - they have a way of always feeling fresh. That won't change the next time they trek south on I-25. 

Hovenweep at vacation's end

Five days on the road two solid days of desolate country began to burn me out. Satellite radio could only replace conversation for so long.  

Ancient ruins and features carved over millions of years still excited me. I had the bandwidth for one last spot. If time allowed, I might squeeze in another. 

After the Bear Ears and even more canyons, passes and winding roads, I came to the last stop in the region, yet another ancestral Puebloan civilization, but one far different than those I already experience on this southwestern swing. 

Friendly local. 

I seemed to come into a farming region, but that faded into more twisty roads and open range once I turned into another series of canyonlands. Despite the name sounding somewhat Dutch – I assumed it was named for some homesteader or archaeologist – it comes from the Ute/Paiute word for deserted valley.

 That certainly fits the area today, with open range to the west and BLM-administered Canyon of the Ancients to the east. I did have a friendly encounter with a lone horse on those twisting roads, but people were rare. 

The Square Tower Community of the Little Ruin Canyon encompasses a different setting for civilization in the Four Corners region. While smaller than Mesa Verde’s massive cliff dwellings, Hovenweep allow visitors to step close to them on a 1.5-mile loop around the canyon rim. 

These cultures lived a stone’s throw from Mesa Verde; you could easily see Ute Mountain to the south near Cortez, both a short distance from the world-famous cliff dwellings. Trading would have been easy. But the Hovenweep culture built differently, placing towers on the canyon’s edge, some right on large rocks. They built little dams to ease the impact of flooding rains and to prepare cropland in the springtime. 

It felt as if the architects of these structures were confident enough in their plans to place them on such precarious ledges. Others fell centuries later after wooden bridges connecting separate structures rotted away. I have seen ancestral Puebloan structures across the Southwest - Aztec Ruins, the still-inhabited Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Nation, the pueblo atop El Morro, the cliff dwellings of Bandelier, and many more. 

The one I should not have skipped on the path out of Canyon of the Ancients was the Lowry Pueblo, an 40-room, 1,000-year-old habitat not far from the farm road I took back to the highway. But it was another victim of an overstuffed day. Thoughts about a Mesa Verde visit ended similarly. There would have to be another Four Corners trip at some point. 

But at the moment, I looked to the people behind these creative structures dotting the region. As we approach a dry age, I think about those people often, as their climate dried out to where the land became unviable for crops. Maybe they overfarmed. Maybe their land grew too populous. One wooden beam has been carbon-dated to 1289, a late time for tcivilizations in the San Juan region. 

These ancient peoples moved on when Europe still struggled with the Dark Ages and had the Black Death on the horizon. We probably won’t be as fortunate to have our structures seen as marvel when the next millennium dawns. 

Last look into Utah. 

 

Natural Bridges near the Bear Ears

Kachina Bridge

 

Sipapu Bridge

Owachomo Bridge

Give the San Juan River credit – it knows how to carve a bridge. Three of the world’s largest natural bridges reside in White and Armstrong canyons. There is evidence of past bridges, now collapsed, as well as Native settlements from the construction heyday of 800-1,000 years ago. 

The difference between natural arches and natural bridges is a matter of size. They’re essentially the same thing, although natural bridges run much larger. 

Owachomo

The Owachomo bridge is thinnest, at 27 feet wide and nine feet thick. It could fall tomorrow or hold steady until the 22nd century. Owachomo, the oldest, longest, and thinnest; Sipapu, the highest and longest in span; and Kachina, the youngest and densest. 

Water still runs beneath Sipapu and Kachina, as evidenced by the trees and shrubbery growing under those bridges. 

Owachomo was formed by floods from two streams, but is no longer on a stream path, with its structure impacted by water from frost and ice. 

The ancient peoples of the Southwest knew this place, and some even lived here. The Horse Collar ruin, the monument’s signature ruin from ancestral Puebloan peoples, is well-preserved and hidden, known for its round structures whose purpose is unknown. 

The national monument has a well-designed road – after the visitor center, cars run along a nine-mile, one-way circular drive on high ground above its canyons, with overlooks and hiking stops for each of the three natural bridges. 

Only the Kachina Bridge is not immediately obvious from the overlook, but anyone staring at the canyon a little more intently can easily pick out the bridge from its surroundings. A difficult hike on an unmaintained trail through the canyon connects all three bridges, but each has its own trail from the canyon rim, plus a connector trail that crosses the high ground above the bridges. 

What the well-signed monument doesn’t tell you that the hardest bridge hike comes first. The Sipapu Bridge has the longest, steepest approach. Haflway down, after two metal staircases and a ladder, I remembered my water bottles were in the car. I consoled myself with the shaded canyon overlook before the steeper descent down to the canyon bottom. I couldn’t go further without risking heat-related illness. That slowed me down at the two subsequent bridges. 

Kachina bridge

Close as I got to Kachina

Canyon walls

Like Sipapu, the Kachina Bridge has a solid structure and feels more of a bridge than an arch. A little forest grows in the gap below the bridge. 

At the Owachomo Bridge, the trail is close, and a ranger even encourage me to go just for the feeling of standing under something carved by nature. This one seemed bore the closest resemblance the Bridge of Khaza-dun from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, with a thin span in the middle perfect for holding off Balrogs. As the thinnest, this one most resembles the arches collected in Arches National Park. I have stood under those cathedrals of stone, so I know the feeling it would bring. 

Instead, I focused on a nearly tame raven moving around the parking area. A Navajo teen visiting with his family inched closer and closer with his camera to where the raven perched. He seemed to have a the right touch. But then as aI walked back to the car, the raven joined me from a few feet away, sitting on a post outside my rental car until I drove out. 

In the miles leading to and from Natural Bridges National Monument, I found myself entranced by a pair of twin buttes atop a mountain. Gradually I realized I fell under the sway of the Bear Ears. 

Within the national monument declared in 2016, there are more than 100,000 archaeological sites, so while it might occupy a mostly deserted region of southeastern Utah, no one can dispute importance to modern tribes. 

It has been a political hot potato, so local non-Native people want mineral exploration on those lands – after the initial monument declaration, a subsequent president reduced the moment’s size by 80 percent, then another president restored its original boundaries. 

While the boundaries might change again as we endure a national selloff of public resources, I can’t look upon those twin buttes and clamor for oil rigs or mines. To scrape away this region’s pristine geography just seems wrong. But too many people don’t see beauty, just dollar signs. The solemn act of being that the Bear Ears perform is not enough. 

As I moved along, the Bear Ears stood silent sentinel, my visit not even a blink during the ages they have overlooked southeastern Utah. 

Bear Ears country

When orchards on the Fremont bloom (Capital Reef National Park)

 

There’s a pecking order to the Utah Five national parks. It’s easy to pair off Canyonlands and Archest or Zion and Bryce Canyon. 

By lacking a nearby dance partner, Capitol Reef gets the short shrift. It sits by itself, away from the interstate and down one windy canyon road. It still gets its visitors and rightly so.

I emerged to field of massive red rock formations after Torrey. I hiked to a short rise above the highway crossing the park, and soaked in the majesty.  There I spoke with an Asian man while at an overlook. He told me the name didn’t make sense until he got up there and recognized the red-rock formations whose shape more some resemblance to the U.S. Capitol building. Time, erosion, and water have carved the Colorado Plateau red rock into intricate mesas and buttes. 

A chill stuck in the air. Capitol Reef felt as if it was still waking up. I didn’t mind. I had no patience for anyone wanting to rush me in this exquisite place. I would rather watch the falcons soar and the Fremont River churn astride the Fruita orchards. 

The attractions of the other Utah national parks also require less of a geology lesson than Capitol Reef does. The Waterpocket Fold, a 100-mile wrinkle in the Earth whose origins reach back 280 million years. This fold of red rock runs down to Lake Powell. 

The Capitol Dome formation’s loose resemblance to the U.S. Capitol gave the park its name. These days most people would agree that central Utah’s version is superior. 

The combination of the Fremont River’s water – its confluence with Sulphur Creek is at the center of Capitol Reef - and the rock formation’s large shadows made agriculture possible in this dry region. For nearly a thousand years ago, ancestral tribes settled on these lush lands, leaving multiple petroglyphs as evidence of their culture. 

The might Fremont

Dry winter has not kept the Fremont down. 

Along with numerous buildings from the former Fruita settlement, the park services has maintained the fruit orchards begun more than 100 years ago. During the summer, one can buy pies made from the orchard fruit or pay to pick fruit from whatever trees have ripe fruit. In early April, the trees continued to leaf out. I only had seen the orchards in winter. 

Resilient Chinese wisteria

This time, the promise of spring and future fruit crops ran deep. I took a short hike along the Fremont, its currents surprisingly swift despite the dry winter. The sun hit the rocks and gradually descended upon the fruit trees. There seemed enough water from the Fremont to ensure a decent crop come summer.  

Near the orchards in a flat, wooded park, a rail fence blocked off a gnarled tree covered in old vines. This Chinese wisteria had been thought dead by park officials, then started blooming again in 2010. On this morning the pale purple blossoms emitted some wondrous scents. 

As I traveled east up the Fremont’s canyon, despite all the geologic wonder that curved with the river, the fragrant wisteria aroma that heralded spring stayed with me most. 

 

Quiet times crossing central Utah

80 miles to Fillmore, no services. 

Pahvant Range at Fillmore

Koosharen Reservoir

Colorado River overlook with Hite Crossing Bridge (center right)

For all the grandeur of Great Basin National Park, everything slips right back to desert in a few fast miles. After the obligatory state line casino-hotel, Utah goes silent for 80 miles. The highway crosses a number of silent mountain ranges, some dusted with snow.

I got my fill of banded rock and little else, moving toward cities as the mile slowly clicked off. The mountain passes were marked with elevation signs more than names. 

Crossing the desert of southern Utah on Easter Sunday was not lost on me, but I did not dwell on it either. The season of renewal was moving forward briskly where water and shade allowed, as the warm winter did not replenish the West as it might have in past years.  

The dry winter meant no glimpses of Lake Sevier, which lies just south of U.S. 50. Lake Sevier is a Lake Bonneville remnant but no longer a year-round lake. Agricultural diversions and lack of a decent snowpack left the lakebed empty. 

For of rural driving, I stayed in Scipio, a little farm town with a large name, at a nice, spartan hotel. Its founded was named after the Roman general who defeated Hannibal and helped end the Second Punic War. 

I fared better with lakes when leaving Scipio early the next morning. Roadhouse Blues came on the radio, and I couldn’t argue with Jim Morrison howling, “Keep you eyes on the road, your hands upon the wheel.” I rolled past Scipio Lake, then winding Rocky Ford Reservoir near Sigurd. The Sevier River had some decent flow through Sigurd, and the creeks in the mountains seemed healthier. 

I stopped near the earthen dam of the Koosharem Reservoir, with morning mist hanging above the surface. A handful of ducks rippled the water, but it was otherwise cold and quiet, the lake not yet in the morning sun. 

Where golden eagles fled

As I started driving again, some large birds picked in the sage ahead. I expected buzzards but realized I stumbled onto a pair of golden eagles, a species I’d never seen in the wild. The eagles ignored me until I braked to find a spot to view them. I could see their pupils dilate as they surveyed me and quickly took flight. They clearly wanted nothing to do with humans. 

I parked and shuffled my camera lens for hopes of a few shots, but with a few muscular flaps of their wings, they cruised out of sight. There would be all sorts of bird sightings in the next 50 miles, but the two that got away would stick with me. I lacked photographic evidence, but I saw them. 

Focusing on the eagles, I paid little attention to the turnoff for Fish Lake, Utah’s largest mountain lake and home to Pando, the quaking aspen clone that has tens of thousands of genetically identical aspens connected by one root system. One of the world’s largest organisms, it could be between 9,000 and 16,000 years old. 

Sure, I saw golden eagles and would soon stand below the red rocks of Capitol Reef National Park. But I hate to miss highlights on roads I might not travel again. 

The quiet of the road resume quickly after Capitol Reef. With many days of roads without services, I knew what I was getting with Utah Route 95. The scenic route has no services for its whole length from Hanksville to Blanding, all 125 miles. 

Hanksville’s famous convenience store built into the stone was closed for Easter Sunday, even if the gas pumps remained on. I didn’t need to fill up but I did anyway. 

Following the patchy Dirty Devil River, I barely saw any cars until reaching the overlook of the Hite Passage Bridge, a turnoff that rises several hundred feet above the Colorado River. The overlook lies on a high bluff five miles from the bridge.   

If I called the Colorado River mighty, you could call me a liar. From this height, the water seemed low, green, and sedate. In an ordinary April, the Colorado would be flush with water. But the Colorado Rocky Mountains are historically dry. 

East of the ghost town Hite lies the Hite Passage Bridge, which marks the unofficial northern end of Lake Powell and the only Colorado River crossing in a 300-mile span between Moab and the Glen Canyon Dam Bridge. 

Hite falls within the northern boundary of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which abuts the southern end of Canyonlands National Park.In this year of deep drought, the Hite marina and boat launch were hundreds of feet from the Colorado’s thin ribbon. When I crossed, I didn’t glance below, and headed back into the bone-dry country. 

From the overlook, it didn’t look especially healthy, although the influence of the dam generally doesn’t reach this far. Following the bridge, I fell back into the land of interesting mesas and rock formations, enjoying the lack of people while it lasted. 

I already felt the pull of home as I reached the Four Corners region, even if I had two-thirds of Colorado and at least three mountain passes ahead.