The Smoky Mountain Hiking Blog: Deputies Free Bear Stuck in Car

So we've all heard about children and dogs being stuck in cars. Now comes word that a bear somehow became stuck in a car in Colorado yesterday. The Jefferson County Sheriff's Department posted this short video on their Youtube account showing how they freed the little guy. It looks like he did a little bit of damage to the car before the deputies could set him free. Here's what the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department had to say about the episode:

Here in JeffCo, we’re used to our fair share of animal-related calls. Snakes, marmots, deer, elk, bobcat, bear. We get them all.

What’s different is when we can’t figure HOW an animal did what it did as was the case this morning when Deputies Tillman and McLaughlin responded to a call of a bear that had somehow entered AND locked itself inside a vehicle.

No windows were broken. The door handles weren’t the kind you lift up. And yet somehow this medium-sized bear managed to open a door, crawl inside and close the door behind him. Deputies could tell by all the moisture on the windows that he’d clearly been inside for a while. Given the size of the bear, they also wondered if there was a momma bear nearby.

After some deliberation, they decided the safest and quickest action would be to pop open the hatch to release the bear. The challenge was that none of the doors easily opened due to the bear’s destruction of the inside of the car, including ripping off the door panels.

The hatch door wouldn’t open with the key fob button so Deputy McLaughlin had to manually open it while Deputy Tillman stood nearby with his shotgun just in case.

Thankfully once the door was open the bear had no interest in deputies, only in getting back into the wild.

Good work, deputies, and we hope this young bear stays far away from cars in the future.