A man target shooting just north of Wolcott made a grim discovery Friday morning, calling in human remains found near Bocco Mountain at 9:38 a.m. Investigators believe the remains are about a year old, and Avon Police Chief Greg Daly said a bear cub may have inadvertently uncovered them while rooting around the area.
According to vaildaily.com, the Avon Police Department and the Eagle County Sheriff's Office are working the case together, with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation's Evidence Response Team also assisting on-site. Daly said he suspects the cub was drawn to a scent in the area and may have disturbed the remains, though officials have not confirmed that theory as fact. Per the Denver Post, the bear had attracted attention in the area Friday and had moved on from the scene by Saturday morning.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife responded to the scene to keep the bear away from investigators as they worked. Authorities said there was no immediate threat to the community, even as the case remains unresolved. Vail Mountain Rescue, the Eagle County Coroner's Office, Avon police and sheriff's investigators all remained on scene through Friday night and into Saturday, with Daly expecting the on-scene work to continue for several more hours.
Open Questions Around Foul Play and a Missing Man
Investigators say they are keeping an open mind about what happened. “We're obviously keeping an open mind, we don't have any answers yet,” Daly said, according to Vail Daily. The remains will be turned over to a state forensic pathologist to determine a cause of death, a process that has not yet concluded.
Police are also looking into whether the remains could be connected to a man who went missing near Route 131 and Ute Creek Road roughly a year ago, though the same account makes clear that link is not yet proven. No determination has been made tying the case to that disappearance, and police do not believe a bear or cub killed the person.
A Record Year for Bear Activity in Colorado
The discovery lands amid what wildlife officials are calling an extraordinary surge in bear activity across the state. Colorado is home to an estimated 17,000 to 20,000 black bears, according to The Denver Post, and the newspaper reported that Colorado Parks and Wildlife logged 6,129 bear sightings and conflict reports between Jan. 1 and Aug. 13 — nearly double the 3,115 reports recorded over the same stretch in 2025. The agency said this year is on pace for the most bear reports since its statewide digital reporting system launched in 2019, a spike officials attribute to widespread drought that has thinned out natural food sources like berries, acorns and plants.
That surge has carried a heavy toll. By Aug. 31, wildlife officers had euthanized 294 bears statewide, more than triple the 83 put down through the same point in 2025, while 98 bears were relocated compared with 33 the year before, per the Colorado Sun. Eagle County itself saw 290 bear-related calls to its sheriff's dispatch between July 1 and Aug. 18, with Colorado Parks and Wildlife separately fielding 81 reports in that window, 47 of them involving property damage, the Vail Daily's coverage of local bear activity noted. The jump has also strained rehabilitation centers: Colorado Newsline reported that the Frisco Creek Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in Del Norte had taken in 41 orphaned cubs by late September, up from 29 the year before, while a second facility in Silt took in more than 30 cubs this year versus just three in 2025.
A Similar Case Near Grand Mesa Offers Context
The Wolcott discovery follows a separate case earlier this year near the Grand Mesa, where investigators found human remains that had been scavenged and scattered by wildlife, according to the Denver Post's July report. In that case, officials said the person's cause of death and identity had not been determined and would fall to the Mesa County coroner's office. Investigators in that incident found no evidence the person had been killed in a bear attack, and Colorado Parks and Wildlife said it did not view the situation as posing any threat to human safety, per Cowboy State Daily. Retired federal ecologist Chuck Neal told the outlet that if a bear did not kill the person, the odds of that same bear later targeting people are extremely low.
No such determination has been made in the Wolcott case, and police do not believe the bear or cub killed the person whose remains were found near Bocco Mountain. For now, the investigation continues, with the forensic pathologist's findings expected to shape what happens next.
