Bears Are Running Amok in Lake Tahoe and Causing Chaos Among Locals

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif.—Peter and Barbie Fons were washing dishes after dinner when they looked up to see a bear in the living room.

“He’s just standing there, you know, on all fours, and he’s got drool coming down,” recalled Peter, 69. “And he walks around the couch and does a big ol’ pee on the floor.”

Barbie hid in a backroom while Peter slammed doors and banged pots and pans to scare off the intruder. The male bear—later identified as a known burglar named Judy—moseyed into a bathroom, put its paws on the counter and sniffed a tube of toothpaste before leaving.

“It smelled like a zoo here for three days,” Peter said. The retired couple was sitting outside under the pines, decompressing over a bottle of Pinot Noir. It was their second bear invasion in a month.

Black bears are on a rampage across America, riding a population rebound driven in part by greater protection of the species. Around small cities and suburbs, the predators follow their keen sense of smell to dumpsters, cars and homes. In Gatlinburg, Tenn., police in May freed a bear that locked itself in a hotel restroom . A contractor in Steamboat Springs, Colo., opened his truck door in June to find a bear cub devouring his lunch.

An estimated 60,000 roam California alone, triple the number in the 1990s. Few places see more activity than the turquoise shores of Lake Tahoe.

South Lake Tahoe police have received 174 bear calls this year through Wednesday, compared with 97 over the same period in 2025. The reports range from brazen burglaries to visitors nervous about a bear wandering by.

Mike Webb cut short a family fishing outing last week after a 200-pounder approached, minutes after Webb’s 11-year-old son caught something. “I was relieved the bear didn’t notice, otherwise we could have had a situation on our hands,” said Webb, 38.

It was a wise move, as the same bear lunged at other visitors minutes later.

Injuries are rare, though officials report as many as five attacks annually around Tahoe and worry the number could grow. “Black bears become addicted to human food, and they seek it out,” said Alexia Ronning, Tahoe bear specialist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. “They will become aggressive.”

‘A great chasm’

The Byzantine nature of government jurisdiction doesn’t help. Tahoe straddles California and Nevada, plus several local counties and towns, often with differing guidelines on something as basic as stowing garbage.

Local authorities and volunteers often clash.

“They both have the same goal—take care of the bears—but there’s a great chasm in how to do it,” said South Lake Police Chief Jeff Roberson. His department convened a “Bear Summit” this year to help bridge the differences.

One group, the BEAR League, responds to hundreds of calls about sightings or incidents yet refuses to share the locations with state agencies. “To them, it’s ‘if you have a problem bear, let’s kill it,’” said Ann Bryant , executive director of the BEAR League.

State officials dispute that, saying bears are euthanized only in extreme circumstances such as after they’ve hurt someone or committed repeated break-ins. They say relocating the bears rarely works because they either come right back or cause the same problems elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the volunteers themselves are at war.

Longtime resident Toogee Sielsch left the BEAR League and started a rival called Team BEAR, which does share bear locations. He said the league demonizes its detractors.

“They spread lies about me, I spread truths about them,” said the 65-year-old Sielsch, who has built a social-media following with posts about tracking bears and booting them from homes.

The BEAR League disavows him. “Toogee is always about his face, his cameras,” said Kathi Zollinger, one of 250 volunteers.

Last week, the competitors went on separate patrols in the same city. Sielsch drove to a home that had been burglarized by a bear to install an electric mat on the back porch. The mats carry a nonlethal but memorable 10,000-volt charge.

“People ask me, what if my dog steps on it?” Sielsch said. “I go, they’ll only step on it once.”

Neighbor Karen Estes watched over a fence with her Golden retriever, Honey. “There’s a bear!” Estes joked. Honey growled.

The next day, Zollinger, 66, of the BEAR League, pulled up to a house with a paintball gun. A call had come in from a homeowner who was out of town and who had spotted the intrusion on a security camera.

Zollinger’s patrol partner slid into the crawl space after the suspected intruder. They aborted the search after finding too little room to move safely, and left a board propped over the hole. “The bear will run you over to get out,” Zollinger said.

She returned to find the board undisturbed. The bear, she concluded, had slipped out before they’d even arrived.

‘The bears are winning’

BEAR Leaguers say the ultimate solution is for all homes in the Lake Tahoe Basin to get wired. A company called Bear Busters said it has installed wiring—an electric force field that delivers a shock—for about 6,000 properties so far.

After a bear was caught on video stealing food from his getaway on the lake, retiree Walt Pudewell last week paid $5,000 to have every door and window secured with electric mats and wiring. That still may not be enough for his wife, Trish.

“I wanted to sell the house,” she said.

What galled her most: the bruin stole her favorite biscotti. “He unscrewed the lid,” she said. “It really ticked me off.”

At nearby Fallen Leaf Lake, Margaret Deanesly Ziegler has tried everything to keep bears out of her 1928 summer cabin—mats with nails, electric bungee cords, even a steel door. A company called Bear-ier Solutions recently beefed up her wiring after a bear surprised Ziegler when she returned with balloons in hand on her 91st birthday.

“I heard the most god-awful noise,” the retired physician recalled. “I jumped up, and I heard the house being wrenched, the wood being torn apart, the house being torn away. I just had a walking stick in my hand because I just come up. I banged the stick and I shouted and you know stomped and did what I could and I never saw the bear.”

Ziegler has spent $7,500 but isn’t sure that’s enough.

“The bears are winning,” she said with a sigh, sitting on a porch overlooking the lake. “I’m the one that’s spending the money.”