Bear Survives Colorado Wildfire, Released In Wild 5 Months Later

LARIMER COUNTY, CO — A young bear is roaming the Rocky Mountains freely again months after being badly burned and nearly killed in the largest wildfire in Colorado history.

The now-1-year-old cub spent the past five months in rehabilitation after he was found with old burns on his feet, frostbite on his ears and weighing only 16 pounds in December. He was a wildlife victim of the Cameron Peak Fire, which burned more than 200,000 acres in Larimer County from August to December 2020.

Defying the odds, the bear ran back into the wild earlier this month, a video shared by the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Northeast region shows.

The injured bear cub was found sleeping on a porch on Buckhorn Road near Masonville on Dec. 11, CPW said in a news release. Most wild animals don’t survive injuries they are exposed to in a wildfire, much less get back to normal, according to CPW Area Wildlife Manager Jason Duetsch.

Watch: Bear That Survived Colorado Wildfire Back In The Forest

“He definitely would not have made it much longer,” Duetsch said in the release. “It is the smallest bear cub I have ever seen at that time of the year, which helped us make the decision to try rehabilitation.”

That rehabilitation included a stay at the CPW’s Frisco Creek rehab facility in southwest Colorado after rescuers used heating pads and supplemental oxygen to help the bear recover while under sedation.

“We could already see really nice healing because it had an amount of fresh tissue that granulated in,” Michael Sirochman, manager of Frisco Creek, said in the release.

The bear made a full recovery, according to CPW, which shared part of the bear's healing journey in its video.

He was healthy, weighing 93 pounds, when when wildlife officer Clayton Brossart released him May 5 into the same county that the Cameron Peak Fire charred months earlier, CPW said.

Larimer County provided the ideal spot to release the bear, Brossart said.

It “has the benefit of being in likely the same drainage where this bear came from originally and still has some suitable habitat post-fire,” he said.