Colorado bear reports jumped 68% this year after the lowest snowpack on record and a May freeze wiped out natural food below 8,000 feet. Almost nobody has been hurt. The bears are the ones dying. And whether you are legally required to store your food depends entirely on which drainage you walked into.
On July 14, wildlife officers near Durango released a black bear east of town and read his tag number. It turned out they had met him before.
He was first captured in 2012, at roughly six years old, as part of a Durango black bear study that ran from 2010 to 2016. He weighed 240 pounds then and weighs 350 now, with a scar splitting his nose and ears torn from fighting. In fourteen years he had never once turned up in a conflict report.
This summer he came into town looking for garbage.
That is Colorado’s 2026 bear season, and it is not the story most people expect. The animals showing up in driveways and campgrounds are not unusually aggressive. They are unusually hungry.
What the Colorado bear reports show
Between January 1 and July 26, Colorado Parks and Wildlife logged roughly 3,960 bear reports statewide. That is a 68% increase over the 2,352 reports in the same window last year.
In Pitkin County, reports rose nearly 31%, and incidents involving property damage and food access jumped 56%. On July 29, CPW launched a joint campaign with Pitkin County, Aspen, Basalt, and Snowmass Village to try to get ahead of it.
Two things make that 68% land harder than it looks.
First, 2025 was already heavy, with 5,299 reports statewide. This is a jump on top of an elevated baseline, not a rebound from a quiet year. Our 2024 numbers looked high at the time and now look ordinary.
Second, it is only July. In 2025, roughly 62% of the year’s reports came in July, August, and September. Hyperphagia, the pre-denning feeding drive, has barely started. CPW says a bear in that state will try to take in as many as 20,000 calories a day and stay awake as long as 20 hours doing it.
The peak is ahead of us.
Why this year is different
Bad bear years usually have one cause. This one has three, stacked.
Colorado came out of the lowest snowpack accumulation season ever recorded. Then vegetation budded early. Then a hard freeze hit in May.
Luke Clancy, a CPW district wildlife manager in the Durango area, explained what that combination did:
“Usually when chokecherries or service berries don’t come in, you still get acorns. Or when the acorns don’t come in, you still see hawthorns or chokecherries out there. This year, not only do we have an extreme drought, but we also had a late freeze in May that has led to a total food failure below 8,000 feet.”
In a normal bad year, one food source fails and another carries the bears through. This year the whole understory failed at once, at the elevations where most bears live.
The drought behind it is not normal either. As of the U.S. Drought Monitor release of July 23, 2.86% of Colorado was free of drought or abnormal dryness, nearly half the state sat in extreme drought, and 12.17% was in exceptional drought, the worst category the scale has. The same week last year, 42.87% of the state was drought-free and exactly zero percent was exceptional.
It is the same drought driving this summer’s fire bans and river closures.
Almost nobody is getting hurt
Here is where most coverage of a “bear surge” goes wrong, so let me be direct about it.
As best I can verify, the only person injured by a bear in Colorado in 2026 was a hiker at Apex Park in Golden on June 21. A bear grabbed her backpack, made contact with her leg, then followed her for about 30 minutes while she tried sticks, rocks, and shouting. Jefferson County Open Space closed 797 acres and 10 miles of trail. The bear was never located.
One scratch. That is the injury record for the worst bear year in the state’s reporting history.
The bears are the ones paying. In La Plata County alone, CPW took more than 300 reports by July 15, over 200 for food-related property damage. Six bears were relocated. Seven were killed, every one for getting into an occupied home. Statewide in 2025, 78 bears were euthanized.
The Durango bear got relocated instead of killed because he had no history. A bear that gets into a house does not usually get that option.
In the Elk Mountains, a perfect bear hang is illegal
So you carry a canister, or you learn to throw a proper hang, and you are covered. Except in Colorado, whether you are covered depends on which side of a ridge you camped on. I read the actual orders. They do not agree with each other.
- Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness is the strictest place in the state. Order WRNF/GMUG #2023-01 lists the legal ways to store food and hanging is not one of them. A container certified by the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee is required. A textbook 10-foot hang is a Class B misdemeanor carrying up to $5,000 and six months.
- The Pike-San Isabel has a forest-wide order covering all six ranger districts and all National Forest land, wilderness and dispersed camping included. Hanging is legal, 10 feet up and 4 feet out. Most people backpacking the Collegiate Peaks or Lost Creek do not know it exists.
- Rocky Mountain National Park requires a bear-resistant container in wilderness camping below tree line and in the Boulder Field, May through October, stored 200 feet from camp. Its compendium allows a hard-sided canister or one with a non-crushable insert, a detail most summaries get wrong.
- Arapaho and Roosevelt covers developed sites, anything within 300 feet of an open road, and within 500 feet of exactly three lakes: Lost, Diamond, and Jasper. Camp at a fourth lake in the Indian Peaks and you are outside the order.
- The GMUG covers developed campgrounds and designated campsites, not dispersed or wilderness camping.
- The San Juan National Forest has no food storage order at all. Neither does the Weminuche, Colorado’s largest wilderness. That is the same corner of the state where La Plata County led Colorado in bear conflicts last year and is having its worst season on record.
Cross one ridge out of the Maroon Bells and your legal obligation evaporates. Walk into the Weminuche during a total forage failure and nobody has written a rule at all.
What to do regardless of what the order says
The law is not a reliable guide to what is safe here. Treat it as a floor.
- Look up the order for your specific unit, not just the forest. Search the forest’s alerts page for “food storage.” Two minutes, and the answer changes by drainage.
- Carry a certified canister in the Elks, and default to one everywhere else. It is the only method legal everywhere in Colorado and it fails less often than a hang. What does not count: a cooler, a backpack, a car with a window down, or a stuff sack in a tree.
- Use the triangle. BearWise recommends about 70 big steps between where you sleep, cook, and store food. CPW says 100 yards. Either beats what most people do, which is all three in one spot.
- Widen your definition of food. Sunscreen, lip balm, toothpaste, bug spray, deodorant, gum, and the shirt you cooked in all go in the canister, along with trash and apple cores.
- Report sightings, not just incidents. CPW area wildlife manager Adrian Archuleta has been blunt that late reporting narrows the agency’s options to lethal ones. A call about a bear working a campground gives officers tools. A call after it enters a building usually does not.
Brenda Lee of the Colorado Bear Coalition put it in one line: “Human-bear conflict is a human problem, not a bear problem.”
The bears did not change this year. The mountain just stopped feeding them. What happens next is mostly up to us.
Reporting from Colorado Parks and Wildlife and CPW’s Colorado Outdoors. Drought figures from the U.S. Drought Monitor release of July 23, 2026. Food storage requirements read directly from the White River, Pike-San Isabel, Arapaho-Roosevelt, GMUG, and San Juan orders and the Rocky Mountain National Park compendium. Rules change; verify yours before you go.
If you see a bear getting into trash, a vehicle, or a building, report it to CPW. Early reports are what keep bears alive.
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