A black bear climbed through a window and swiped at a sleeping Colorado girl

A black bear tore off a window screen, forced the window open and climbed into the bedroom of a sleeping 17-year-old girl in Durango, Colorado, before dawn on Sunday, September 13, scratching her stomach as she pulled blankets over herself. Colorado Parks and Wildlife said the bear retreated when she screamed, came back briefly, then left for good only after she sat up and yelled. The attack came two days after a different black bear bit a woman through her tent at a nearby campground, part of what the agency now calls the most bear attacks on people it has ever recorded in a single year.

A Window Screen Torn Off Before Dawn

The girl had left her bedroom window cracked open in her family’s Durango condo on Escalante Drive when the bear tore the screen away, pulled the window fully open and tore down a curtain to get inside. The bear entered the room twice, swiping at her stomach through her blankets before she screamed loudly enough to drive it out.

Luke Clancy, a district wildlife manager for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, said the layers of bedding likely kept the encounter from becoming far more serious. “The woman is very lucky she had multiple blankets covering her when the bear swiped her,” Clancy said in the agency’s account of the incident, carried by EIN Presswire. The girl was treated for scratch wounds and bruising; she was not hospitalized.

A Tent Bitten Through Two Days Earlier

On the morning of Friday, September 11, at roughly 5:30 a.m., a black bear bit a woman on her right forearm through the wall of her tent at Park Creek Campground near South Fork, in the Rio Grande National Forest, according to ABC News‘ account of both incidents. She never saw the animal, only heard it growl before it bit down, and was treated by emergency medical services before follow-up care at Rio Grande Hospital.

Area Wildlife Manager Rick Basagoitia, who investigated the campground bite, concluded the bear had not been hunting the woman. “The bite in this incident was more likely an act of surprise than aggression,” Basagoitia said, adding there was no history of conflict at the site and “no continued threat to public health and safety at this time.” The Rio Grande National Forest closed Park Creek Campground for the rest of that weekend and then shut it down for the season, a closure already scheduled but moved up because of the attack, according to the Denver Gazette.

Colorado’s Worst Year on Record for Bear Attacks

Colorado Parks and Wildlife has now confirmed 10 bear attacks on people in 2026, the highest number the state has ever recorded in a single year. Reports of bear activity generally have nearly doubled: the agency logged 6,129 bear reports between January and mid-August of 2026, compared with 3,115 over the same stretch of 2025, and the year is on pace to blow past the 5,299 reports logged in all of 2025, according to AccuWeather’s reporting on the trend.

Widespread drought and a thin mountain snowpack wiped out much of the berries, fruit, nuts and native plants bears normally rely on heading into hyperphagia, the fall feeding period when a black bear can spend up to 20 hours a day searching for food and consume as many as 20,000 calories trying to fatten up for winter. Colorado Parks and Wildlife’s own guidance on the species notes that bears “who find human food, even once, can change their habits to seek food from human residences and trash cans,” a shift the agency says is now playing out statewide, as detailed on its black bear management page.

What Happens Next for the Durango Bear

Colorado Parks and Wildlife said it planned to trap and remove the bear responsible for the Durango bedroom attack, citing the severity of that encounter along with a subsequent break-in the same bear was linked to at a nearby residence, according to the Denver Gazette’s reporting. A bear that has broken into an occupied home once and returns to try again is treated differently from one that reacts defensively in the wild, since repeated entries into living spaces signal the kind of learned, food-seeking behavior wildlife managers consider the hardest to reverse.

The Park Creek bear, by contrast, was not targeted for capture. Investigators closed that case without identifying or trapping a specific animal, judging the tent bite an isolated, defensive reaction rather than a pattern of aggression, and noting no prior conflicts had been reported at that campground before the September 11 attack.

A Colorado Parks and Wildlife official urged residents across the region to “close and lock their doors and windows during this high human-bear conflict year” and to keep trash, pet food and other attractants secured, according to ABC News’ report on both incidents.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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