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The nice thing about Super Bowl Sunday in Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park is that the traffic is extremely sparse.
Looking out over Horseshoe Park.
The peaks above are labeled in the pic below.
The road was closed just a few miles up, so there wasn't a lot to see in the way of spectacular 12,000+ foot views or amazing wildlife scenes like we saw during our visit last summer.
Still, we were finally able to finish the audio book of World Without End, which we've been listening to since way back during our trip to Grand Teton National Park in the early fall. So even though we didn't get up to see as much as we had hoped we might, it was not at all a disappointing trip.
As we were headed back through Estes Park, we did see some bighorn sheep ewes and their young in a group near the side of the highway. Farther on down, we passed two elk cows crossing the road.
According to the National Park Service, by 1950 the bighorn sheep population in the area of Rocky Mountain National Park had dwindled to around 150, down from a population that had numbered in the thousands during the mid-1800's.
Today, there are about 350 bighorn sheep in the RMNP area.
This particular group was seen just inside the town of Estes Park.
The ends.
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