Camper bitten by bear in southern Colorado recalls moment it "came crashing" into tent

Kathleen Baran will be fine, thanks very much for asking, despite a black bear chomping down on her arm through her tent wall near South Fork, and having to unclamp the marauder’s jaws by punching it in the face. 

But there are a couple of things Baran wants inquiring minds to know. First, no, she absolutely did not have food in her tent that might have attracted the bear, despite what she says Colorado and Arizona health officials said about her while exchanging information. 

And second, a bear bite described in news releases as a bland “puncture wound” actually hurts like a mother … elephant sitting on your arm. She thought she had broken a bone. Or two. 

That said, Baran, an experienced international solo hiker and camper, feels lucky today, after Friday’s early-morning attack at a campground she’d pulled into to get a few hours rest while on a road trip. Lucky the blind attack wasn’t from a wolf, as she first suspected when startled awake by the grip of sharp teeth through tent fabric. And fortunate it was her arm and not something else. 

“I’m very lucky because he could have easily just chomped down on my head and not my arm if I had not put my arm up,” said Baran, speaking by phone from the remote area of Arizona she calls home. “I mean, it could have kept on attacking. I didn’t know what he was doing because I was stuck inside my tent. That was the worst part of it. I couldn’t see where he was, what his next move was going to be.”

Prepared for (almost) anything

Baran, who does not like to give her exact age beyond “older Gen X,” has traveled and camped around the world. She’s walked out of a tent to find grizzly bear paw prints in the mud. She’s had close encounters with moose. A black jaguar once sat down next to her in the Guatemalan jungle. She knows to hang food high in a remote tree when backcountry camping. 

She knew Colorado and other states were seeing extra bear confrontations this year because of habitat loss to drought. She was pulled over at Park Creek campground in Rio Grande National Forest near South Fork for some quick road rest and wasn’t setting up a full-kitchen camp spread, but she also knew keeping all food and alluring smells out of her tent was best bear practice. 

“I’m not an idiot,” Baran likes to point out. 

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Baran allows that perhaps her one mistake was leaving a phone on low volume playing a sleep program. The light noise could have made animals curious. 

Before going to sleep, she heard a crackle she now believes was the bear “testing” the other side of the tent with a swipe, but she thought at the time it was a branch falling or a skunk snorting around the fire ring. 

She used her key fob to “flash the car on and off to make noise and to flash lights, and then I went to bed. And then next thing you know, I’m woken up by the tent crashing in on me, and I don’t know what it is, but it’s him jumping on the tent.” A weak light from her phone illuminated the chaos just a bit. 

“There’s claw marks on the tent there, which helps wake me up, from a dead sleep. What the hell? And this feeling of absolute dread because I know something’s going down. And then I wonder, is it a human? Is it an animal? And what’s my next move? What’s theirs?”

There was a brief pause. Then …

“It was so quick. He was on the other side of the tent, and he comes crashing down on me. So I put my arm up to protect my face. I still don’t know what the hell is going on. What’s after me? So I put my arm up to protect my face and he grabs hold of it. Now, he growled at some point. This is why I originally thought it was a wolf because I didn’t know bears growl. But my arm was in his mouth. It felt like a big mouth.”

With the jaws clamped on her right arm through the fabric, she flailed with her left arm at the still-unseen attacker. 

“And that’s when he growled and let go,” she said. “I didn’t pull my arm out of his mouth. He just let go of it.”

One good arm, and on the run 

Baran said the next moments were a blur, as the tent collapsed and she flailed around for her phone, her car keys and fob and her handgun. She managed to pull open the zipper and chamber a round in the gun. 

“I never did fire it, because I couldn’t see him, and he was no longer attacking by that time, and he didn’t come back while I was there. I was told by the rangers that he came back after I had left,” Baran said. 

Then the pain started to break through the disorder. The jolts were overwhelming Baran’s experience as a medic. 

“I thought he had crushed my arm. The pain was out of proportion to what I saw,” she said. “I’ve got a trauma bag in my car, but I have only one hand working, and I think my arm is broken, and the tissues are just smashed. That’s how bad it feels. And when I saw just three puncture wounds in my arm, I’m like, oh, this is way out of proportion, man, and I don’t know why it was.”

Finally oriented enough to get behind the wheel and drive, she got to a nearby hotel around 6:30 a.m. and stumbled into the lobby. “I think I just said, ‘I need a hospital. I got attacked by a wolf I think,’ and you know they can tell I’m kind of in shock.”

People in the hotel called authorities, and she was treated for the puncture wounds and a rabies assessment at the emergency room. A scan found no broken bones. A wildlife officer met her back at the campground and showed her claw marks on both sides of the tent as well as footprints, and declared it a bear visit. 

Baran found herself compiled into Colorado bear statistics rising at an alarming rate in 2026. There have been thousands of human-bear encounters driven by lack of backcountry food, and a record 10 dangerous attacks where a human was injured or killed. Wildlife officers and deputies had euthanized  nearly 300 bears by the end of August, and caught and transported many more. 

Colorado Parks and Wildlife said it will not chase or capture Baran’s bear, because it has not shown a pattern of human confrontation and may have acted out of surprise when exploring the tent. The bear and the human never actually saw each other, leaving some of the interaction a mystery. 

What bothers Baran most about the whole incident is how humans acted, not the animals. As she was semi-lost and driving erratically out of the dark campground in search of help, she saw two people standing outside the only other tent in the campground. Baran had been screaming bloody murder just yards away, and they hadn’t reacted at all, she said. 

“They had no idea if that bear killed me. When you hear someone screaming for reality, it’s a different sound than someone screwing around or someone angry,” Baran said. She notes that she keeps a gun with her on solo trips out of fear of what humans might do, not what animals are born to do. 

“I know animals can attack. I treat encounters with alertness and with a lot of respect for that animal and its ability to harm. You won’t see me petting bison or moose in Yellowstone,” Baran texted Wednesday, in a followup message to the phone interview she did from town. 

“I won’t stop backpacking by myself. But I might buy some bear spray. Until this bear the only wildlife that has ever bit me was a squirrel at the Grand Canyon.”