ASPEN — For the past 30 years, bears have been part of the job at the Hickory House.
This story first appeared in The Outsider, the premium outdoor newsletter by Jason Blevins.
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The Aspen barbecue joint sits at the western edge of town, where the houses give way to open space and Castle Creek torrents toward the Roaring Fork River. It is also, from a bear’s perspective, an excellent place to eat.
Longtime owner Paul Dioguardi smokes and grills meat overnight, and the smells from his smokers drift into the cool night air. Behind the restaurant, a cluster of coolers, dumpsters, compost bins and trash cans crowd into a small alley.
Needless to say, Dioguardi has learned to live with bears. Over the years they’ve torn apart his coolers. They’ve pried open dumpsters, mangled compost containers and gone after his grill. At the beginning of every summer, he prepares for them with the arsenal he has accumulated over the years: bleach, plywood and nails and, now, electric mats that deliver a jolt of electricity when a bear steps on them.
“He gets a little shock, and he’s not happy,” Dioguardi said.
On average, Dioguardi says he deals with bears a couple of times a week.
But while bears getting into things in Aspen is hardly breaking news, similar encounters are on the rise throughout the city and across the state. As of Aug. 13, Colorado Parks and Wildlife received 6,129 reports of bear sightings and incidents, already surpassing the 5,299 reports CPW received during all of 2025. The agency says that both drought and wildfire have contributed to challenges for wildlife and the habitats they depend on.
In Pitkin County, CPW recorded 331 bear reports, up nearly 31% from 252 last year. More tellingly, incidents involving property damage and bears accessing food and nonfood sources were up 56%, according to CPW.
In Aspen, the city’s wildlife program has recorded a dramatic increase in bears getting into trash, recycling and compost. According to Lara Xaiz, the city’s parks and open space wildlife coordinator, there were 74 such incidents by this point in 2024 and 127 in 2025. This year, they’ve logged 311.
Because of the uptick in activity, city staff are checking Aspen alleys seven days a week this year, compared with five or six days a week in the past, Xaiz said.
“That explains the numbers being a little bit higher,” she said, “but doesn’t explain them more than tripling over the past three years.”
Wildlife officials say the problem doesn’t start in the dumpsters and coolers of Aspen but in the forests and mountains where bears normally find their food.
A lighter buffet
Black bears are omnivores and opportunists, eating a wide range of foods as they move through the seasons. In spring, they turn to grass, flowers and other new vegetation as they emerge from winter slumber. By summer, fruits and berries become more important. In fall, as they prepare for winter, acorns and other high-calorie foods become critical. Bears also eat bugs, fish and other animal matter when they can find it.
This year, though, some of the most important foods are scarce.
John Livingston, a Colorado Parks and Wildlife public information officer in southwestern Colorado and a lead on the agency’s statewide bear working group, said bears in his region have found less of their typical food sources, including serviceberries, hawthorns and especially chokecherries. Drought has left many grasses — which bears turn to in difficult conditions — dry. And the Gambel oak that typically produces abundant acorns across southwestern Colorado is not producing much of a crop this year.
That is particularly concerning because acorns become a critical food source in late summer and fall, when bears enter hyperphagia — the period when they ramp up their eating before winter denning. During this time, a bear can consume as many as 20,000 calories a day, Livingston said, and may spend up to 20 hours a day awake and searching for food.
But this year’s food shortage has already changed bear behavior. Instead of spending their days moving through the forest in search of berries and nuts, Livingston said, “we are seeing bears awake constantly searching for food, so people are noticing bears in neighborhoods and communities during daytime hours more regularly this summer when that may only be common most years during the hyperphagia time period.”
Without regular nuts and berries, bears turn more to grasses and carrion, including roadkill and other dead animals. They may also opportunistically prey on fawns. On July 29, Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials responded to reports of a bear eating a dead bear in Steamboat Springs.
Even though Aspen’s serviceberry crop has actually been better than in other places in the Roaring Fork Valley, Xaiz said, she recently looked at oak trees around town and found the acorns sparse.
“We could be in for a really tough fall,” Xaiz said.
Why are towns so alluring?
“If I was a black bear, I’d want to live here,” Livingston said of Durango.
The city of about 20,000 sits in the Animas Valley, surrounded by the food sources black bears love and the forests and waterways they use for denning, drinking and cooling off in hot weather.
It is also, in many ways, typical of bear country in Colorado. According to CPW, an estimated 17,000 to 20,000 black bears live in the state, the vast majority on the Western Slope. And many of Colorado’s mountain communities are built much like Durango: tucked into river valleys, bordered by national forest and other wild lands, and threaded with the creeks and drainages that wildlife use to move across the landscape.
That means bears don’t necessarily have to go looking for a town. In many places, towns are simply next door to where they live.
“It’s not hard for a bear to follow a drainage right into town and find human-provided food sources and then follow the same drainages back out of town to get away from humans during the busy day-time hours,” Livingston said.
In a normal year, a bear might have plenty of reasons to stay in the forest. But when natural food is scarce, the calculus changes. Places like Aspen and Durango — and communities from the Western Slope to Colorado’s Front Range — offer something the drought-stricken landscape may not: concentrated calories, available in one place.
Restaurants, dumpsters, bird feeders, pet food, grills, unsecured garbage and even an unlocked garage can all become efficient sources of food.
“Bears will look for opportunities to consume as many calories as possible while expending the fewest amount of calories to do so,” Livingston said. “Human-provided food sources often allow them to take in a lot of calories in one place without having to range a great distance to find that food. That will condition them and their memories to continue to look for these easy meals.”
Bears can remember where they found food for up to two years, Livingston said. A successful raid dramatically increases the chance that a bear will return to the same place.
At the Hickory House, Dioguardi has seen that behavior firsthand.
“They’re creatures of habit,” he said. “If they get in one time, they’ll come back.”
Over the years, Dioguardi has learned to hit the problem early with bleach, physical barriers and electric mats. After the city loaned him two mats early this summer, Dioguardi is now considering buying his own.
“Right now I don’t think they’re coming at all,” he said.
That’s the outcome wildlife officials want, because the alternative can be much harder to undo. A bear getting into trash may seem like a nuisance. Wildlife managers see it as the beginning of a potential behavioral progression: a bear finds food in a garbage bin, then perhaps a bird feeder or pet food. Eventually, it may follow a smell through an open garage door, an unlocked car or an open window.
“They are curious and also hungry,” Livingston said.
By the time a bear is entering homes, the conflict has escalated considerably. That’s why wildlife officials are asking people to report problems early, particularly if a bear is repeatedly hanging around a property or has begun getting into garages or other structures.
“The sooner you call, the sooner we can work with you to identify what attractants might be bringing them in,” said Rachael Gonzalez, a CPW public information officer for northwestern Colorado.
Early intervention gives wildlife managers more options. They can educate homeowners and neighbors about attractants, haze a bear away from an area, help residents make their homes less appealing or, in some cases, trap and relocate an animal. Nevertheless, relocation is not a cure-all.
“This is displacing a bear often more than 100 miles from its familiar surroundings and putting it on top of other bears that are territorial and also trying to survive,” Livingston said. “It’s been shown that they may return back to the same place they were originally involved in conflict, sometimes within a week.”
And once a bear enters a home, the consequences can become much more serious.
“Nobody gets into this profession because they want to put down animals,” Livingston said. “It is incredibly hard on our officers when we only find out about conflict once it has gotten to that point.”
Everyone has a role in protecting bears
Government agencies aren’t the only ones trying to keep bears out of trouble. Citizen groups like the Roaring Fork Valley Bear Coalition, Bear Smart Durango and Keep Bears Wild Steamboat also help fill the gaps with education, equipment and neighborhood-level outreach. The Roaring Fork coalition, for example, distributes bear-safety checklists door-to-door, organizes fruit-tree gleaning to remove rotting fruit and loans electric fencing, netting and mats to protect chicken coops and fruit trees.
“Not everyone wants to work with law enforcement or the government,” Xaiz said. “So they’ve been super helpful. And not all agencies have resources to address human-bear conflict. It needs to come from community members and volunteer organizations.”
Ultimately, wildlife officials say, preventing conflict depends on individual residents, too: securing garbage, recycling and compost; removing bird feeders; keeping pet food indoors; cleaning and securing grills; locking doors, windows and vehicles; and telling neighbors when bears are active nearby.
That vigilance now matters because the hardest part of the year is still coming. In late summer and fall, bears become almost single-minded in their pursuit of calories before winter denning. This year, some of the foods they depend on most, like acorns, will likely not be there, potentially pushing more bears toward the places where food is plentiful, concentrated and easy to reach. And once they find it, they will remember.
For 30 years, Dioguardi has learned that the best strategy is to make sure a bear never gets the reward in the first place. If it can’t get into the cooler, it moves on. But if it gets in once, he knows what happens next.
“They’ll come back.”