Snapshot of the Great Lakes

 

Seated at the western end of Lake Erie, Toledo seemed the right spot for the National Museum of the Great Lakes. 

Like many Great Lakes ports, the riverbanks of Toledo are still heavily industrial in spots. The city returned some of the old industrial area to parkland, but the history of commerce and travel across the region gets chronicled at the National Museum of the Great Lakes. Tracing the history back to Native trade across these waters, the stylish museum sits adjacent to two historic vessels are permanently docked on the Maumee River’s east bank. 

Poor air quality made it hard to fully appreciate the ships. We took the staff’s advice and viewed them first before delving into the museum. 

The museum includes summertime access to the SS Col. James M. Schoonmaker, a lake freighter that stayed in service for nearly 70 years, and the Great Lakes Towing Co. tug Ohio. The inside of the Schoonmaker offers a glimpse at the freighter’s immense cargo holds, which could host coal, grains or other materials. The engine room is a from a different time and different world, and one can only imagine the sweaty work involved to keep the ship running. 

The crew chambers were spartan, with a kitchen not unlike a diner, while the officers dining hall felt straight from a high-end restaurant. The aft of the ship hosted quarters and a wooden parlor for the shipping barons, which were elegant and unlike everything else on the Schoonmaker. Life might have been hard for the crew, but not the captains of industry. 

After walking the deck, engine room, bridge, and parlors of the Schoonmaker, we breezed through the tug Ohio. 

There’s a whole history of lake travel lost to the 21 century. Passenger ships were regular until the business grew unprofitable from car and air competition in the 1960s. Perhaps the last shipping baron of note was George Steinbrenner, better known these days as the longtime owner of the New York Yankees. 

You can’t get into the lore of the Great Lakes without the Edmund Fitzgerald. The museum knew this well. 

In one of the crew chambers of the Schoonmaker, the lyrics Gordon Lightfoot’s seminal song about the Great Lakes’ most famous wreck are framed on the wall, which seemed appropriate. It was a ship of an earlier generation, but one that would have faced the rough Great Lakes weather that arrived with November. Lightfoot took immediate inspiration from the tragedy of the largest ship to sink on the Great Lakes, breaking in two and sinking to the bottom of Lake Superior on Nov. 10, 1975, claiming all 29 men aboard. 

What did surprise me were the artifacts from the actual Edmund Fitzgerald exhibited in the museum. These times bobbed up from the wreckage site, some 500 feet below the surface. The inflatable lifeboats deployed automatically due to building water pressure as the ship sank. 

Freighters still ply the Great Lakes, but the museum made me wish that passenger ships still did. I know little of Lake Erie’s north shore outside of the border crossings on either end. Even a ferry from Cleveland to the Canadian side always felt like an omission. 

Sure, no major population center awaits just over the horizon in Ontario, but it felt like a good dream. After all, the Great Lakes should not be the sole dominion of giant freighters and those who can afford their own boats. 

The other side of the lake

From the deck of the SS Schoonmaker

 

Downtown mural

Tallest building and open drawbridge

No travel barrier exists along the Lake Erie shore between Toledo and Cleveland. Anyone can just follow the roads west. 

But Toledo was just an abstraction to me. Two hours down the Ohio Turnpike or Ohio Route 2 was too far and never once considered a travel destination. The furthest point west my family traveled in Ohio was Cedar Point. The closest I came was a 2002 Put-in-Bay trip, and several trips north on I-75 toward Detroit or Ontario. Passing on the Ohio Turnpike doesn’t count since it cuts south of the city. 

Meg hails from Toledo, as do several generations of her family. In late July, I finally stopped in The Glass City. The small but sturdy skyline of Ohio’s fourth-largest city lies on the Maumee River at Lake Erie’s west corner, surrounded by farmland once occupied by the Great Black Swamp (small patches have been restored or preserved). 

The drive up from Cincinnati would wait till the Sunday drive home. We crossed rhe Ohio at Louisville and headed up to Indianapolis then a diagonal to Fort Wayne. We crossed the same farm country that occupies most of Ohio west of Columbus. Red-roofed barns and wide-porched farmhouses sat at the edge of fields, properties broken by little thatches of forest. A congregation of Amish and/or Mennonites in their traditional clothing sat at a truck stop due to some mechanical problem on their bus. 

 But the picturesque farm country quickly grew hard to enjoy let alone see as smoke blotted out the sun. I didn’t count on Toledo having the worst air quality in the country during our visit. The weather app might call it fog, but it’s smoke. 

No fire appeared. Where is the fire, you might wonder? It sure wasn’t local. The fire comes from one thousand miles away, raging in the ancient forests of north Ontario. A series of strong winds ushered it south. Politicians of a certain stripe were quick to criticize Canada and slow to mention climate change. 

Perhaps taking care of the wildfires ravaging the west would be a more prudent. Eighty miles from my Colorado home a cadre of Canadian firefighters and equipment have battled one fire after another. 

I never experienced anything like that smoke on the Great Lakes before. With the root causes of the fires unlikely to end, I expect it might be the first of many smoke alerts. 

But back to Toledo. In some ways, it felt like Cleveland. Strong institutions, well forested, some rundown areas (although it was often block to block).  

Toledo can claim one of the best-named teams in minor-league baseball – the Toledo Mud Hens, which goes back to 1896. The Detroit Tigers affiliate plays in a nice downtown ballpark surrounded by a revitalizing warehouse district. 

We had dinner at Quenched and Tempered, a sleek but unpretentious taproom across the street from the ballpark. Less than 20 minutes before game time, the team cancelled the Friday game on account of air quality. The sports culture ties into Michigan more than Ohio. Ohio State and Cleveland sports fans are secondary to University of Michigan and Detroit support. Before the Mud Hens games, Tigers gear was everywhere. 

Toledo has stayed vibrant through another Michigan connection, the auto industry. Toledo remains the headquarters for the Jeep brand, with Jeep Wranglers still constructed at a Toledo-based plant. It still underwent a major population drop, but it was also sturdier. You could see the blocks that fell into disrepair, but not necessarily whole neighborhoods. Sometimes vibrancy changed block to block. 

The city’s population has not grown since the 1960s, but it never grew as large as Detroit or Cleveland. Areas with a suburban feel stand only a few miles from downtown. Once heavy on German and Irish immigrants, it has a heavy Eastern European influence (as seen with Tony Packos, a local dining institution). 

When the smoke cleared, I got a better view. Despite its industrial origins, the city has shifted toward riverfront parks and paths. The small skyline finally broke out. Industry has not been moved away, not with the advantages of Lake Erie shipping so close, but it seems to do well. 

Maybe the smaller scale is appealing in middle age or whatever I qualify as now. Still, I can’t help but see the bones of any Rust Belt town and know they are sturdy. This one just anchors a different part of the lake. 

Let's try it with a little less smoke next time.

The commute nears its end

Heading down Monument Hill, July 2026

 

Rising over Monument Hill on any dark morning, and the road traverses a stark, beautiful dreamworld. 

On the high plain between Denver and Colorado Springs, a number of mesas and buttes punch through the pre-dawn no matter the skies that frame them. 

Most commute days start in total darkness, when Colorado Springs feels fast asleep. Only in months on either side of the summer solstice do I depart with daylight. 

The highway tells a different story, although traffic ebbs and flows, usually moving at the speed limit or faster. There are trucks, but not an abundance. 

From Memorial Day to Labor Day, RVs and trailers grow thick as tourists descend upon the Front Range. In May, the volume noticeably creeps higher, as the occasional RV grows into several dozen between South Metro and Colorado Springs. 

But crossing the pass atop County Line Road is the moment when I feel like a western commute. Nothing can rival that sight. Monument Hill is one of Colorado’s lowest passes, but it is a magnet for the worst weather on I-25, so I tend to stay home on bad weather days. 

Headed up the hill

North of the pass, the road traverses southern Douglas County, which is largely undeveloped with a few small towns, county parks, and large farms/ranches. Snow coats these hills far longer than anything in Colorado Springs or Castle Rock. Several ponds in the Greenland area host numerous water fowl. One morning I counted six heron dipping their beaks in search of breakfast.  

The ponds could draw some larger visitors in the future. The state built a wildlife overpass around Greenland. Several elk and deer have already been spotted on trail cameras. 

The highway is an engineering marvel, crossing foothills and craggy land before straightening near Larkspur. Sometimes I take the toll lanes coming home; I have learned where the traffic bogs down for no reason, and $2 for 10-plus miles is worth not dealing with that foolishness. 

Nature has one last flourish to deliver.  Every commute, I look for ripples from the beaver pond on the west flank of one mesa. The lodge is unmistakable, and the surface freezes solid in winter. But I have yet to see evidence of the lodge’s builder in that quaint pond. 

The mesas run up to Castle Rock – the town’s namesake is one of them. The Rockies become more visible here. Civilization creeps in at Castle Rock, a booming suburb with endless rows of apartment buildings designed to be as architecturally uninteresting as possible. 

Centennial office site, 1950s (Source unknown)

 With construction of a new exit south of Castle Rock, the industry runs thick. In the zone sit numerous flatbeds with steel beams waiting for installation during the night closures I just miss. The road comes with two main challenges – getting to work before sunrise, when the blinding rays enter the morning, and traffic, which gets thick around 7:30. 

Traffic backs up for 470, Denver’s outer loop, and I have to tolerate it; the County Line Road exit lies just off a few hundred feet north. Inattentive drivers always sit in the “exit only” lanes for County Line till the last second. 

Apocalyptic IKEA view, August 2023

I park with the blue bulk of IKEA's south Denver store across the parking lot. I have walked for breakfast regularly, and inevitably left with handfuls of household items I didn't know I needed.  Consider what an ordeal most people face just to visit IKEA, I felt lucky to have it so close. 

I try to paint the drive with minimal strokes for people at work so no one realizes I actually enjoy it under the right circumstances. It’s an album-length drive that can move swiftly at those hours. 

Fifty-five miles is no quick distance, and often the worst of American driving is on full display. But pieces of the commute present beauty every time. 

Three years later, the end of the commute looms. Work situations have changed – my division is getting sold off, and I’m the only employee of that division in Denver. 

Springtime office visit view, 2025

Wintertime office view, 2024

 By the end of 2026, I will bid goodbye to the commute. One last drive south with a box of personal items from my Denver desk. When I travel north, I will remember the commute, but it won’t be a routine anymore, just muscle memory. 

Maybe I will find another job in South Metro Denver. Maybe I’ll move to Denver for job further up. But the latter means the commute of soft morning light on the mesas won’t resume. 

Homeward bound, June 2023

The relentless fire (Aspen Acres edition)

A dry, warm winter made the brutal 2026 fire season a certainty. In climate this dry, it takes nothing – spark from a blown tire, errant fireworks, a lightning strike, or a tossed cigarette can start an inferno. 

Little fires have popped up since late winter. One burned near the edge of Fort Carson in April. But the big fires are just getting started. A fire jumped the Utah-Colorado border and took the lives of three firefighters dropped off in a remote area to carve a fire break. A fire in the San Juan Mountains burns between Ouray and Ridgeway. 

But almost daily I see the distant smoke rising from the Wet Mountains, where the Aspen Acres Fire is only slightly contained. The Aspen Acres Fire has raged for two weeks and pushed past 100,000 acres, making it one of the state’s biggest fires ever. The force fighting Aspen Acres has grown to more than 1,600 people. If the fire spreads beyond Wetmore, the next threatened place becomes Florence, and the complex of federal prisons on its west edge that includes the ADX Supermax, home to El Chapo and every criminal with “bomber” in their nicknames. All those people on the ground have been digging earth to make firebreaks to slow the fire and increase containment. 

This fire will be forever linked to the small community of Beulah Valley. Driving 20 miles across the rangeland west of Pueblo gives no indication that Beulah lies ahead until the road twists down into the beautiful, forested valley. Above it lies the Wet Mountains, which generally receive substantial moisture despite being in the 12,000-foot range. Night skies run as dark as it gets – one night several years ago, I was content to watch the Milky Way from the middle of Pine Drive, no artificial light anywhere near me. 

The Beulah Volunteer Fire Department have been heroes here, getting residents evacuated and trying to minimize impact on the town, even as some firefighters lost their own homes. In Colorado, there are few mountain spots where a person of middle-class means can live anymore. In some places the super-rich (Aspen, Wyoming’s Jackson) have been pushing out the merely rich. In others, a modest two-bedroom house might surpass $1 million, and an efficiency apartment would be priced beyond the income of any local service worker. 

Beulah is among the few that feels more like a community, where everybody knows each other. People I know host a community dinner for more than 200 people every June. They celebrate other community meals together, including Thanksgiving. 

This year, July has brought the Aspen Acres Fire to Beulah. The fire reached Beulah quickly and has threatened the towns of Wetmore and Rye, also under evacuation. The national forest land in the Wet Mountains is remote with few access roads, giving the fire room to burn. While no lives have been lost, the evacuation order still holds. Barns at the state fairgrounds in Pueblo are full of evacuated livestock. 

Thus far, Beulah has taken the brunt of the damage. A drone tour from the Pueblo County sheriff shows the damage (watch here, but be warned, it’s tough). At first it seems like the Beulah has not been hard hit. The pine forests seem intact in many places. But a closer look reveals the horrible truth – piles of white ash between the trees are former houses. More than 200 homes in Beulah were destroyed. 

This fire forms a sad epilogue to Zoofari. I don’t know how many of those friendly folk are now homeless, but I know some are. In their company, I went from eating alone to being surrounded by friends in a few short minutes. The lady who saw me by myself and introduced me to them might have lost her house. 

Most early images from the Wet Mountains come from high above or the occasional active trail camera that has not been consumed by the wave of fire. As containment has gradually grown above 60 percent, the toll has become clearer, even as the fire still rages to the southwest of Colorado Springs. 

The best-known place in the fire zone is Bishop’s Castle, the labor of love constructed in this wilderness over five decades by one dogged man, the work now continued by his family. While the castle looks sturdy, fire would expose how much wood went into its construction. It appears as if the castle has not been consumed. Until the fire is out, there is still risk, as the castle sits in the evacuation zone. 

Other popular facilities have not had such luck. The Pueblo Mountain Park lost all its facilities, with only the stone walls of the lodge remaining, and all 2026 events cancelled. 

All of it brings me back to Zoofari. I spend most my night in the company of Beulah residents. Pretty much everyone from dinner was from there. Some of those new friends undoubtedly lost their homes. The early images of the town show home One could only imagine the horror. 

Just a week after a fun evening, the world gets turned upside with evacuations and houses scoured from the landscape. Beulah will rebuild, but it will be a hard road for those who lost everything to a mammoth fire.

Forgotten remembrance: 20 years of Don’t Call Me Ishmael

I missed my own anniversary. 

Sometime around Memorial Day 2006, I noticed everyone I knew had a blog of some sort. What else could I do but try my own hand at that game. I wrote two posts after driving home from a campout and attending the Worthington Memorial Day parade. It was an outlet to my opinion column, a place to write with less restraint. 

On Memorial Day 2026, I never gave though to the blog-a-versary. Only in July, remembering a favorite summer some 20 years ago, did I realize the occasion had not been marked. The writing has changed over the past two decades, with travel the dominant topic, along with hiking, local exploration, and music. Some of those old posts are downright embarrassing, but I leave them up, letting it serve more as a diary than a grand repository of thought. 

Across thoseyears, I accumulated 1,528 posts. That averages to 76 posts a year, although that is skewed due to the one year when I managed 250 posts. I still don't know how that happened, although the posts skewed shorter in those days. I tend to write longer now, in search of something more qualitative or thoughtful. I don't always accomplish that, but the blog's half-dozen regular readers have not complained. 

Twenty years later, I still aim for 50 posts a year. I’d like to think the writing might still be ongoing as I approach 70 two decades from now. As long as I still enjoy it, the blog will be there in some form. 

The readers have never been there and if I did it for validation alone, it would have not survived 2006. But it has lasted through three times, two multi-state moves, four cats in the house, one significant other in the house, and gives me an outlet I sorely need most days.

A moment away at 2026 Zoofari

Will squeeze through rails for crunchy produce

I had no idea what would unfold at the Pueblo Zoo on the summer solstice. I only know it fell on Pueblo’s hottest day yet in 2026. The 100-degree afternoon left me wondering if an outdoor event was a big mistake. 

I grabbed a hotel in Pueblo West, so I did not have to trek home that night. Before I got into some business casual clothes, I took the coldest shower I could stand. 

Quinn is being watched. 

Zoofari is a more upscale event than most the zoo offers - $150 a head, no one under 21. Before I bought the ticket, I did wonder if it were too upscale for me, having rarely worn slacks since the pandemic. For once the zoo had a dress code – no jeans or T-shirts. I showed up with a golf shirt and slacks, but nice shorts in the car. 

Upon seeing numerous men wearing shorts get in line, I returned to the car and went with the shorts. No one minded. This wasn’t Brew at the Zoo, and I appreciated that. But I also appreciated not having to swelter in those slacks. 

Before serving dinner, Zoofari hosts a series of animal close-ups. Being indoors made the penguin encounter an easy place to begin. The zoo has 10 penguins, including a chick hatched in early 2026. The keeper brought out Quinn. 

Before they could get the door closed behind Quinn, two other penguins, including Duckie, attempted to force their way through the door. It’s an exhibit full of quirky personalities. I was hoping for Duckie, since he became a celebrity when he made it deep into a national March Madness competition of zoo penguins, only losing to a young penguin chick from the Indianapolis Zoo (a market 15 times the size of Pueblo). 

Quinn surveying the room. 

But Quinn was quite the personable fellow as well. The zookeeper brought Quinn into a penned observation area, where he explored his space and acquiesced to gentle pets from onlookers. His exhibit-mates took to the water and for a while he watched them. The feathers were far softer than I expected, and not rubbery at all for a seafaring creature. Quinn is nine, old for an African penguin in the wild due to predation, but he lives in a habitat with a 30-year-old African penguin, so age is just a number. 

Some teen volunteers showed off other animals in the EcoCenter. A pair of domesticated ferrets roamed a pen, eager to check out some tunnels in the enclosure. Then I need to feel the shell of the turtle exploring another pen. 

The sun dropped enough that the outside animal encounter was bearable. Two exotic cattle came out for crunchy snacks. One cattle, a shaggy Highlands breed, preferred carrots, the other was particular to apples. They could squeeze their heads through the fence up to their horns and went as far as they could after they finished each round. 

The third encounter was at the zoo's veterinary center, which is not normally open to the public. Those areas include the hay barn, the oldest structure at the zoo, another of the august stone structures that rose under the Works Progress Administration. The area supervisor and the zoo veterinarian took us through the pristine facility. 

Pueblo Zoo does not have any megafauna – giraffes, elephants, rhinos – so most animals can be examined in their facility. The bison get exams in their yard because it’s too hard to move them if sedated (bulls run 3,000 pounds). They had one small animal in an incubator – she had been rejected by her mother, but the zoo staff were letting her age here so she could eventually rejoin the enclosure after an introduction. Out of respect for the zoo, I won’t say who was in the incubator, as they also asked me to keep photos off social media (and this blog would count). 

Instead of a buffet, they had food from three food trucks, plus an open bar. I drank water and mocktails whenever the chance presented. On a full stomach, sangria seemed too fitting on this triple-digit night. For entertainment, the night included acrobats twisting through metal rings attached to the roof of the pavilion, and an Americana band. 

I have always been partial to seeing places outside of typical hours. As the live auction rattled by, I excused myself for a last pass through the zoo on the longest day of the year. The pelicans bedded down on the shores of the moat that surrounds the lemur’s outdoor island. The goats, cattle, and sheep kept grazing, unfazed by fading daylight. Inside the EcoCenter, the penguins congregated toward their nesting nooks.  

Drowsy pelicans.

Penguins winding down. 

Everyone around African Adventure had called it a day. The lions had left their yard for the off-exhibit area. Most animals with indoor spaces had adjourned for the night. I did not blame them. Even with the sun nearly set, the heat did not really relent. We were still in the low nineties as twilight approached. I hoped the late hour might be ripe for an appearance by one creature I have never seen at the Pueblo Zoo, their ringtail. A Southwest raccoon relative, they are highly nocturnal, and twilight still proved too early to catch any glimpse of him. I will keep hoping to spot him. 

At that point I needed a break from auction watching. The night ended with a live auction full of items far out of my price range, but I had designs on a few silent auction items. 

The animal print paintings made by actual animals fit a theme in my living room. Years ago in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, I purchased a painting of grizzly paw prints painted by the Riverside Discovery Center’s resident bear, Smokey. 

The Zoofari silent auctions included a handful of paintings from resident animals – one from Ducky the African penguin, one with prints from each member of a new penguin family, and a nose print from their bull bison C.J. I watch them religiously all night but fell behind as both penguin paintings soared above my maximum. The bison nose print bidding slow and I pounced and $105 proved the high bid. 

My major prize. 

As the night wound up, I walked out with my new bison art plus an appreciation for how Pueblo could come out for one of its venerable institutions. While waiting for my item, I had a good conversation with a board member about the ups and downs of the Pueblo Zoo, about how its staff carves out out a community place on a shoestring budget. In a night where almost every conversation was with a stranger, it felt right to have one more before I hit the road. 

The zoo holds its own, caring for two hundred species that liven up its corner of City Park. Plus, its bull bison painted a pretty nice nose print.

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