Colorado logged its sixth bear attack of the year after an angler was mauled at a trailhead

Colorado Parks and Wildlife counted the mauling of a man in his 60s at a Jefferson County trailhead as the state’s sixth reported bear attack of 2026. The report went out on August 22, 2026, and the number is dated to that day: the agency’s tally kept climbing afterward, and by mid-September it stood at ten.

The man had been fishing and was walking back to the North Fork trail parking lot at about 8 p.m. on a Friday when a subadult female black bear, weighing 50 to 60 pounds, knocked him to the ground and bit his legs. In the agency’s words, “the attack continued for several minutes until the victim’s friends scared the bear away.” Other people nearby helped him until he could be taken to a hospital with leg injuries. He was not carrying any fish, a detail CPW noted when it described the scene, and the bear had no cubs with it.

The North Fork trail mauling and the sow that was euthanized

Officers searched for the animal with tracking dogs and euthanized a subadult sow on Saturday morning, according to Denver7’s account of the CPW report. Wildlife officers found no cubs nearby and determined she was not nursing, which removed the usual explanation of a mother defending young and left investigators without an obvious trigger.

CPW planned a necropsy to look for a medical or physical reason behind the aggression, and KUNC reported on August 24 that destroying a bear after an attack on a person follows the agency’s protocol. No necropsy result had appeared in any of the coverage reviewed for this article.

Apex Park to the North Fork: the six entries

The count began on June 22, when a hiker in Jefferson County’s Apex Park was followed down a trail for more than 30 minutes by a bear that had grabbed her backpack and touched her leg. CPW’s release that day stated, “This is the first reported bear attack in Colorado for 2026,” and blamed high bear reports on a warm, dry winter that thinned natural forage. The agency’s June 22 notice is the earliest entry in the series, and it came from the same county as the angler’s mauling two months later.

Four more were logged before the angler. One came on August 18 near Eagle-Vail, where a female bear with cubs in the area swiped a man’s arm in an apartment laundry room and he hurt his foot tripping as he fled. CPW’s Eagle County release said that “severe drought conditions have driven increased wildlife activity in populated areas.” The North Fork trail case then became number six.

The word “reported” matters in that tally, because the figure comes from incidents that reached the agency and says nothing about encounters that went unreported. A bear that follows a hiker for half an hour, as at Apex Park, counted in the series even though the woman was barely touched, so the definition covers aggressive contact as well as bites, and a mauling like the North Fork case sits at the severe end of the same list.

Drought, sightings and the 2024 baseline

CPW public information officer Rachael Gonzales told KUNC that “bears right now are in search of food, and they are opportunistic.” The agency’s own comparison shows how sharply the years differ: five attacks in 2026 as of the morning of August 22, three in all of 2025 and one in 2024. The trailhead mauling made six.

Sightings and conflicts moved in the same direction. Between January 1 and August 13, CPW logged 6,129 bear sightings and conflict reports, nearly double the 3,115 recorded across the same stretch of 2025, according to the Denver7 report. The agency tied the jump to the drought, which had reduced the natural food bears rely on in late summer.

The tally after August 22

Six did not hold for long. On August 28, CPW’s Estes Park release described a bear entering a home through an unlocked window around 4:30 a.m. and knocking an elderly woman to the ground in her kitchen; the notice gave no running number, and it said multiple bears had been breaking into occupied homes and vehicles in the area over the previous few days.

By September 15, Fox affiliates reporting CPW’s figures put the year’s confirmed total at 10 attacks on people, which the agency described as the most on record. Two of those came days apart that month: a woman bitten on the arm in a tent at a South Fork campground, and a teenager scratched when a bear came through a bedroom window in Durango. CPW said of the campground bite that it was “more likely an act of surprise than aggression.” The August 22 trailhead mauling was therefore the sixth of ten, in a year that began with a single reported attack in June.

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

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