‘Absolute tank’ of a bear found under deck in Colorado mountain town

DURANGO, Colo. — An absolutely enormous bear was spotted under a deck in Durango this week and was moved to more bear-friendly territory outside of town, Colorado Parks and Wildlife said.

“Check out this chonk of a black bear our wildlife officers moved Thursday from underneath a deck on the west side of Durango!” CPW said on the social media platform X. “He’s an absolute tank.”

“What an absolute unit,” CPW said.

The old boar wasn’t a stranger to Durango. He’d been spotted getting into trash and fruit trees frequently over the summer.

“There was one deck he showed to be fond of,” CPW said. “He hadn’t come back to the deck in a few weeks, but he showed back up on Thursday.”

When the homeowner went down the stairs to his back porch, the bear growled and huffed at him. So the homeowner called CPW.

It took two darts to get the bear to go down, and then wildlife officers had the hard work of pulling the massive bear out from under the deck. It took four officers to get the bear loaded into a stretcher that could be pulled into a trap, CPW said.

Once in the trap, the bear got a quick health exam and a reversal drug. Officers released him far away from town in “quality bear habitat” with lots of natural forage. Bears are currently in hyperphagia and are consuming up to 20,000 calories a day.

CPW said they moved the bear because “a deck is no place for a bear to set up shop,” especially in the final few weeks before denning season.

If you read this story and had a sense of deja vu, that’s because only two years ago, CPW removed another massive bear from under a Durango deck.

“Different bear, same story,” CPW said. “The west side of Durango grows em big.”