Vacationing Couple Hides After 4 Bears Break Into Colorado Airbnb

A Denver couple spending the weekend in an Airbnb in Snowmass, Colorado, saw four bears raiding their kitchen early on Sunday morning.

The couple, Morgan Adrian and Cullan Barkau, said they woke up to the sound of a bear scratching at the basement window of their rental home at around 6.30 a.m. MDT (8.30 a.m. EDT) on Sunday. They said the four bears, a mother bear and her three cubs, made their way up the stairs to reach the deck of the home. When the couple heard a loud crash right after, they realized that the bears had entered the home.

"As soon as we realized they were inside. It got pretty scary. We didn’t know if they were going to come into the basement if they were going to get aggressive," Barkau said. The frightened couple proceeded to use a mattress to block their door. They called 9-1-1 and requested assistance. They also took a video of the bear and the mess it made in their rental home.

"We were frightened," Adrian said. "There was a 10 or 15-minute window where we were alone," before the responders reached the scene.

An officer arrived at the scene and the adult bear was shot with a bean bag gun. The officer then successfully corralled the three cubs out of the rental home.

According to Adrian and Barkau, the bears didn’t do much damage to the home, but they did leave garbage all over the kitchen.

The bears are currently in hyperphagia, a period of time when they are constantly eating to fatten themselves up for hibernation, a spokesperson for Colorado Parks and Wildlife said. He added that during this period, bears will keep searching for all available sources of food for 20 hours in a day, and will be aggressive in nature.

The spokesperson said experiences like the one the couple underwent were less common this year as abundant natural food was available in the Aspen and Snowmass areas for bears right now.

In an unrelated incident, a woman accidentally trapped a bear inside a van Sunday. The animal broke and escaped through the vehicle's window. The incident, which was caught on camera, happened outside a home that belonged to the woman’s, Nicole Minkin Lissenden, parents in Asheville, North Carolina.

The bear somehow managed to crawl inside the car through the passenger door which was at the time unlocked.

When Lissenden noticed the door was open, she closed it, trapping the bear inside. When she returned back to the car about 30 minutes later, she noticed a paw print on the window.

"As I tried to figure out what to do, the bear started getting more anxious to get out and set off the alarm, honked the horn and rocked the van back and forth," Lissenden said.

After several attempts, Lissenden and her husband succeeded in opening the lock of the car. But the bear grabbed on to the window, broke it, and squeezed itself out through the gap.

"After he left our yard, he walked right into a neighbor's kitchen. We're just happy no one was hurt," Lissenden said.