Kendrick Park sits on Sheridan’s north side, just off Gillette Avenue, and it has a free municipal zoo that most residents walk past without registering how unusual that is. A free zoo. In a city of 18,000 people. Open every day.
The zoo is small — that’s the honest description. You’re not going to mistake it for the Denver Zoo or even Cheyenne’s Frontier Park setup. What you’ve got is a compact loop of enclosures near the park’s northern edge: bison, elk, whitetail deer, a black bear, various birds, and a handful of smaller mammals. The animals are native or near-native to the region, which gives the place a coherence that bigger facilities sometimes lack. Standing ten feet from a full-grown bison in an outdoor pen hits differently than watching one through binoculars on a highway shoulder near Yellowstone.
The park itself does a lot of work beyond the zoo. There’s a decent playground, a swimming pool that opens in summer (day passes run a few dollars for kids, a little more for adults), picnic shelters, and a good stretch of grass that sees a lot of frisbee and informal soccer on warm evenings. Kendrick Creek runs along part of the property, and in spring the whole thing gets genuinely green. It’s the kind of park where you go to let kids run for an hour and find yourself still there ninety minutes later.
The neighborhood around it is residential and quiet — older houses, mature trees, the occasional person walking a dog past the park boundary. Gillette Avenue isn’t a destination corridor, which means parking is never a problem. You pull up, you walk in, you don’t pay anything to see the zoo. That still feels like a small miracle every time.
Summer mornings are probably the best time to visit the zoo section. The animals are more active before the heat sets in, and the light is better if you’re trying to photograph the bison without getting glare off the fence. By mid-afternoon in July, everything slows down — including the visitors — and the bear, in particular, tends to be parked in the shade doing nothing photogenic.
The pool draws a crowd on hot weekdays, mostly kids from surrounding neighborhoods and families who want something affordable and local. It’s not a waterpark — it’s a pool, with lanes and a diving board — but it’s well-maintained and the staff is generally good with kids. Admission is low enough that it barely registers as a cost.
What makes Kendrick worth writing about isn’t any single feature. It’s the combination: a zoo, a pool, a creek, solid shade trees, and enough open space to feel like you’ve actually gone somewhere, all within a short drive of downtown. Parks like this used to be more common. Cities used to build them as a matter of course, then stopped. Sheridan kept this one going and kept it free, which says something about the town’s priorities, even if most people who live here don’t stop to think about it.
If you’re passing through with kids, this is an easy, no-cost two hours. If you live here, it’s the kind of place worth remembering exists.
