On August 11, a video started circulating of a black bear cub wandering through the dining room of an upscale Aspen restaurant, sniffing booths and set tables while diners filmed from a safe distance. The actress Justine Bateman posted the clip, and by the next morning it had the kind of reach that turns a local wildlife story into a national one. For Red Mountain residents, the footage landed differently than it did for the rest of the internet. This is not a story about a strange town somewhere in the mountains. This is the neighborhood, and this is the trail network that starts at the bottom of Red Mountain Road and climbs into the same drainage where that bear, and a great many others, have been spending their summer.
The headline number behind the video is real: statewide bear reports to Colorado Parks and Wildlife are up 68 percent this year compared to the same stretch in 2025. But the number that residents who actually use Hunter Creek and Smuggler Mountain Road every week should sit with is a different one, and it points somewhere the bear coverage hasn't.
Your Trailhead Is Your Driveway
Most Aspen wildlife stories happen to someone else's neighborhood. This one doesn't. The Hunter Creek Trailhead sits directly off Red Mountain Road, close enough that residents on the lower switchbacks can walk to it. A mile or so further up, Red Mountain Road continues past the Hunter Creek corridor toward Four Corners and Van Horn Park at around 9,900 feet, tying into the same drainage that Smuggler Mountain Road climbs from the other side of town. Locals treat the whole system as one loop: down Hunter Creek, up through the meadows, back along Smuggler's switchbacks to the Observation Deck above town. It is also, without much fanfare, one of the most heavily used bear and moose corridors in Pitkin County.
That overlap matters more this year than most, because 2026 is not behaving like a normal season.
What the 68 Percent Actually Measures
Here is where the number needs unpacking rather than repeating. Colorado Parks and Wildlife logged roughly 3,960 bear reports statewide between January 1 and July 26, 2026, against 2,352 in the same window last year. In Pitkin County specifically, reports rose nearly 31 percent year over year, and incidents tied to property damage and food access jumped 56 percent. Those are big jumps, and they sound like a story about danger.
They aren't, mostly. Look at what happened to people this year, not what happened to trash cans:
| What the data shows | What it says |
|---|---|
| Statewide bear reports, Jan 1 to Jul 26, 2026 | 3,960, up 68% over the same period in 2025 |
| Pitkin County bear reports, Jan 1 to Jul 31 | Up nearly 31% year over year |
| Property damage and food-access incidents, Pitkin County | Up 56% |
| Bear-caused human injuries statewide in 2026 | One, a scratch, in Golden, not in Pitkin County |
That last line is the whole thesis in one row. In a year one Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologist has already flagged as unusually difficult for human-bear conflict, the recorded human injury count in the entire state was a single scratch from a bear that grabbed a hiker's backpack near Golden in June. The animal was never located and no one else was hurt. A 68 percent jump in reports produced almost no actual harm to people. What it produced was a spike in bears getting into unlocked cars, unsecured trash, and open garages.
Lara Xaiz, the city of Aspen's wildlife coordinator, put a date on how much earlier this started. Last year her first bear-in-the-trash call came April 9. This year it came March 3. The drought driving all of this has thinned the natural mast crop, the acorns, berries, and seeds bears rely on to build fat reserves, so they're arriving in neighborhoods hungrier and sooner, and staying later. Bears entering hyperphagia, the pre-hibernation feeding state that can push their caloric needs to 20,000 calories a day, will keep working the edges of town through October. On July 29, Colorado Parks and Wildlife launched a joint conflict-reduction campaign with Pitkin County, Aspen, Basalt, and Snowmass Village specifically because this pattern is regional, not a one-off.
None of that changes what a bear does on a trail. It changes what a bear does to an unlocked Subaru or an unlatched trash bin, which is a property problem with a known fix: Aspen's bear-resistant trash ordinance carries fines up to $1,000 for noncompliance, and locking car doors, an act that sounds almost too simple to mention, is one of the more effective things a Red Mountain household can do this fall.
The Animal With the Worse Reputation Isn't the One Everyone's Watching
Here is the part the viral video crowds out. Ask Aspen's own officials which animal on this exact trail system worries them more, and bears are not the answer.
Smuggler Mountain Road, part of the same network Red Mountain residents loop through, has a documented history of closing for moose, not bears. In one case a young bull moose spent a Sunday morning browsing grass a quarter mile up the route and forced Pitkin County Open Space and Trails to shut the popular trail while a ranger and sheriff's deputy waited it out. In another, county officials issued a warning after three moose, a bull, a cow, and a yearling, were spotted in the area, aggressive enough that a Pitkin County Sheriff's Office official told residents plainly that people don't realize moose are the most aggressive animals in the area.
This year the moose activity is elevated too. Xaiz told The Aspen Times that 17 moose sightings had been reported in Aspen so far this summer, concentrated in riparian zones like Maroon Creek, Castle Creek, and North Star Preserve, but moose range widely and show up on Smuggler and Hunter Creek regularly enough that neither trail should be treated as moose-free. Calving season, which runs early summer, makes mother moose especially unpredictable, and Xaiz's guidance is specific: if a moose is blocking the trail, don't assume it will move for you. Turn around and go back the way you came. Fall brings a second risk window, as mating season makes bull moose more aggressive heading into September and October, which leaves Red Mountain's trail regulars little room to relax between spring and summer's protective mothers and autumn's territorial bulls.
Dogs complicate both animals but especially moose, which read an off-leash dog as a wolf, one of their few natural predators. Leash rules exist on Hunter Creek and Smuggler Mountain Road for exactly this reason, and this is not the year to treat that rule as optional.
Reading the Season Right
None of this means avoiding the trails that make Red Mountain worth living on. It means adjusting a few habits that cost nothing and change the odds meaningfully:
- Lock car doors before an evening walk. Bears are documented opening unlocked vehicle doors, and an unsecured car is one of the most common property-damage calls this year.
- Keep trash latched and stored per Aspen's ordinance. The $1,000 fine is real, but the bigger cost is training a bear to treat your alley as a food source it will return to.
- Leash dogs on Hunter Creek and Smuggler Mountain Road without exception, particularly through moose calving season and into the fall rut.
- If a moose is on the trail ahead, don't push past it. Turn back. Officials have said directly that assuming the animal will yield is the mistake that leads to charges.
- Report any bear entering a vehicle, trash enclosure, or building to Colorado Parks and Wildlife. Early reports are part of what keeps a food-conditioned bear from escalating to the point where relocation is no longer an option.
The bear video will keep circulating for another week or two before something else takes its place. The actual story for anyone who drives Red Mountain Road home each night is quieter and more useful: this is a hungrier bear year with almost no recorded danger to people, layered on top of an ordinary moose season on a trail system that has closed for moose before and will again. Reading the season correctly means worrying less about the animal with the viral video and paying more attention to the one with the trail closure history.
If you're weighing what a property on this stretch of Red Mountain actually offers, from trail access to the rhythms of the neighborhood day to day, Lex Tarumianz can walk you through it with the same level of specificity. Request a confidential consultation to talk through what living on this corridor really looks like, season to season.
