Avon Police Fire Bean Bag Bullets to Evade Bear Crisis

Aspen —The late summer sun hangs low over the Roaring Fork Valley, casting long, amber shadows across the asphalt of Main Street in Avon. The air is dry, holding onto the heat of the day even as the temperature begins to dip, a stark contrast to the cool, misty mornings that usually signal the approach of autumn. In this quiet stretch of the town, where the only sound is often the distant rush of the river or the hum of a passing truck on I-70, there is a new, underlying tension. It’s not the traffic or the tourists; it’s the rustle in the brush, the sudden stillness of a dog mid-stride, and the frantic phone calls that light up the Avon Police Department’s dispatch board.

Drought conditions have stripped the higher elevations of their natural food sources, sending hungry bears descending onto the valley floor with a singular purpose: to fatten up for winter. They are looking for food, and they are finding it in neighborhoods that have grown accustomed to the peace of suburbia. The Vail Daily reported on this surge, noting that law enforcement agencies across Eagle County are dealing with an explosion in bear-related calls. In Avon specifically, Deputy Police Chief Coby Cosper stated that while the department received approximately 86 bear calls in all of 2025, they have already logged 118 this year. “I would say every day, or every couple of days, we’re getting some kind of call about a bear,” Cosper said.

The scale of the problem extends beyond just nuisance calls. Between July 1 and August 18, the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office logged 290 bear calls, while Colorado Parks and Wildlife received 81 reports, with 47 involving property damage. The stakes have risen from curiosity to crisis in parts of the county; in EagleVail, a bear scratched a man on his arm in August, requiring treatment at a local medical facility. But for the folks living in Avon, the fear is often more intimate and immediate than a scratch. Cosper noted that bears have successfully broken into homes in three separate instances this year, creating what he described as “high-stress, scary situations.”

When a bear is inside a home, or entrenched in a trailer park, the Avon Police Department has turned to a specific tool: bean bag bullets. These non-lethal rounds are fired from shotguns, and they offer a middle ground between a verbal shoo-away and lethal force. “We’ve used bean bag rounds several times this year,” Cosper explained. The sound is distinct — a sharp thud rather than a crack — though technically, an officer is firing a shotgun. In one instance, officers opened a door and shot the animal in the rump to drive it out of the kitchen. In another, they deployed them in a trailer park. The goal is removal, not elimination.

Despite the frequency of these encounters and the use of firearms to manage them, Avon has not had a single report of a bear-human interaction where a bear made physical contact with a person this season. Cosper emphasized that no officer in Avon has been involved in a bear conflict requiring the use of a regular service weapon. “That would be a mandatory notification for me, so I would know about it even if I was not at work at the time,” he said. “We have not used lethal weapons to shoot bears here in Avon.”

The valley is changing. The landscape that once offered a buffer between the wild and the domestic has thinned out, forcing an uneasy coexistence. As night falls over the foothills, the silence returns, but it is a heavier kind now, punctuated by the occasional bark of a dog or the distant report of a shotgun that isn’t quite as loud as it looks.