The Bears Came Down the Mountain
Drought emptied the high country's pantry. Utah's black bears went looking for dinner — and found ours.
By Cal Tebbs
A black bear walked into Park City in May.
State wildlife biologists did what they usually do. They trapped it, drove it deep into the backcountry, and turned it loose near Avintaquin Mountain, better than 60 miles from where it started. A clean outcome. Bear goes home, everybody moves on.
In August, the same bear turned up in Vivian Park, in Provo Canyon.
That single animal — one bear, two counties, one summer — is a fair summary of the strangest wildlife year the Wasatch Front has seen in a long time.
The number
The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources reported on Aug. 27 that its biologists and partnering law enforcement agencies had responded 168 times to bear issues statewide as of Aug. 25.
For all of 2025, that number was 83.
The season isn't over. Utah has, by the agency's own account, more bears turning up inside city limits than it has ever recorded.
Why: an empty pantry at 8,000 feet
Roughly 90 percent of a black bear's diet is plants — berries, acorns, grasses, roots. Not garbage. Not pet food. Plants.
That crop failed this year, and it failed in stages. A warm spring pushed vegetation out early. Hard freezes killed it back. Then extreme heat and severe drought finished the job on whatever survived. By midsummer, the berry patches and oak brush that normally carry bears through August simply weren't producing.
Bears don't have the option of waiting it out. They range farther. They drop in elevation. And a few thousand feet below the oak brush, they find neighborhoods where the food is concentrated, reliable and sitting at the curb in a plastic can.
Utah's bear population is also larger than it was 30 years ago, according to DWR trend models. And the state's growth has pushed hardest into exactly the wrong places — the canyons and foothills that were bear country first.
Where: closer than you think
The Wasatch Front is not accustomed to this. Bear reports here have historically been a novelty. This August they were a weekly occurrence.
Provo. Multiple residents reported a juvenile black bear in an east Provo neighborhood north of Splash Summit Water Park on Aug. 12, one of them on a doorbell camera. Provo Animal Control and DWR responded. The Salt Lake Tribune later identified it as the same bear relocated from Park City in May.
Mapleton. A sow and two cubs were photographed high in a tree in early August. Later that month, on Aug. 20, a cub made repeated appearances in the Harmony Ridge community. DWR officers and Mapleton police searched twice, eventually trapped it, and euthanized it — separated from its mother, its odds of surviving on its own were judged to be very low.
Springville. Springville Police posted a photograph of a bear moving through town on Aug. 15, with a request that residents secure garbage and pet food.
Payson and Spanish Fork. More sightings the same week. A mother and two cubs crossed a Spanish Fork field.
Provo Canyon. Vivian Park, in August.
Beyond the Front, the pattern held. A 2-year-old bear was tranquilized and euthanized in south Logan after roaming near highways and apartment complexes. A cub was pulled out of a window well in Mount Pleasant. In Grand County, wildlife officers relocated four bears in three days along the Mill Creek Parkway after they discovered local orchards.
The part nobody enjoys
Not every bear gets a ride to the backcountry.
DWR policy calls for euthanizing a bear any time it injures a person. Beyond that, officers may euthanize a bear that behaves aggressively, shows little fear of people, keeps returning to populated areas, or does significant damage to a home or structure. A bear in poor health, or one unlikely to survive being moved, may also be put down rather than relocated.
There is no soft landing available. Utah has no certified rehabilitators equipped to house bears or other predators, and zoos and accredited facilities have limited space for new animals. Relocation, as the Park City bear demonstrated, doesn't always take.
Chad Wilson, the DWR's game mammals coordinator, has been blunt about what it costs the people who have to do it — noting that his colleagues went into wildlife work because they love wildlife, and that having to kill an animal because someone left a campsite dirty is hard.
"Please don't put us in that situation," he said.
When: the risk is climbing, not falling
Here's the part worth circling on the calendar.
Late summer into fall is when black bears enter hyperphagia — the pre-hibernation feeding push, when a bear eats close to around the clock to build the fat it needs to survive winter. It is the hungriest stretch of a bear's year, and it is happening right now.
Michael Packer, a conservation outreach manager with DWR, told the Park Record that bears at this point in the season are taking in every calorie they can find. "A shortage of a natural food supply and a need to put on fat," he said, increases the odds of a conflict.
That's the arithmetic of this particular autumn: the hungriest weeks of the year arriving on top of the worst natural food year in recent memory. DWR expects activity to keep climbing until cold weather and denning shut it down.
The historical record backs the seasonal read. A published analysis of DWR's bear conflict database covering 2003 through 2013 found 224 recorded events in Utah, with summer far and away the most common season — roughly 78 percent — and campsites accounting for about 40 percent of incidents. Most occurred at night.
Which is to say: August through October, after dark, near food. That's the window.
The good news, such as it is
Almost all of this is preventable, and preventing it is unglamorous. It's a garbage can and a bird feeder and a bowl of dog food on the back step.
A bear that finds nothing moves on. A bear that finds dinner comes back — and that's the bear that ends up dead.