Sometimes you never know what kind of animal might break into your car when you live near the forest in Colorado. As captured on video, one man living in Gold Hill thought that a crazy neighbor had been honking a car horn all throughout the night. It wasn’t until the morning that he found his SUV had trapped a bear inside waiting patiently for a rescue.
Man cleverly opens the car door without using his hands
Footage of the bear encounter shows a pair of men, one (presumably named Patrick Sullivan) holding the camera and another helping the animal out, surrounding the gray SUV on July 19, according to a TikTok video posted by NBC News.
By the time they arrive, the bear was calmly sitting in the passenger seat of the car, having been stuck inside for a good part of the night. It had somehow opened an unlocked door and then trapped itself inside.
“A bear got stuck in a car and locked himself in last night,” the man comments, “and I heard honking all night, thought it was a crazy neighbor, and it was just this guy sitting on the horn.”
In a lengthier video of the incident from KYMA, the man believes the bear had eaten the top off what looks to be a car seat as a “little snack.”
Meanwhile, another man had carefully tied a rope to the handle of the door to the back seat. The pair heads as far away from the car as the rope will let them before they open the door, offering a large exit point for the bear. The animal doesn’t hesitate and quickly flees out of the vehicle and back into the woods.
Van Hoose, an officer for Colorado Parks and Wildlife, told Outside that bear sightings have been higher in the state this year than usual. By June 23, the CPW had logged over 1,500 bear reports in 2026, compared to only 1,000 at the same time in 2025.
“We’re expecting this to be a higher conflict year with bears because we have a historically low snowpack,” Van Hoose explained. “The Colorado winter didn’t really happen. We didn’t get the normal amount of snow that would sustain bears’ natural food sources, the cherries and berries that they should be eating. Bears still have to eat, and in drought years, they go into neighborhoods and towns, looking for trash and food.”
