Colorado’s suburban bear encounters are surging — and your trash can is basically a welcome mat.
If you’ve been spotting more bears wandering through your neighborhood lately, you’re not imagining things — and no, that 400-pound black bear rifling through your recycling bin at 2 a.m. is not your neighbor’s new dog.
Bear sightings and conflicts across the Denver metro area and along the Front Range, including one this week in my Lone Tree neighborhood, are surging in 2026, with Colorado Parks and Wildlife logging over 6,000 statewide sightings and incidents by mid-August alone. That’s nearly double previous averages, and the summer isn’t even over yet. So yeah, this is a thing now.
Why Your Backyard Has Become a Bear Restaurant
The short answer: we’ve made it really, really easy for them.
The longer answer involves a combination of nature doing nature things and humans doing, well, human things…