Lake Tahoe — with its luxury vacation homes dotted through alpine forests, its tens of thousands of tourists, and its huge concentration of the species Ursus americanus — has long been at the center of California’s human-bear conflicts.
Bears stroll out of the woods and across crowded beaches to snatch food from coolers. They sneak into ice-cream stores, smash through car windows and break into houses, trashing kitchens. Often, they go viral on Instagram and TikTok in the process.
They have become as much a part of Lake Tahoe lore as lazy afternoons by the water or starlit evenings under mountain peaks. And so too have the fights about what to do about problem bears — with some activists accusing the California Department of Fish and Wildlife of being too quick to euthanize naughty bruins, instead of educating the public to better coexist with their ursine neighbors.
But even in this environment, the fight that has roared up in South Lake Tahoe this summer is unlike anything many on both sides of this issue have seen in years. For the last few days, bear activists have been staging a round-the-clock bodyguard operation, including sleeping out in the woods, to protect a cub and a home-raiding bear that the state has targeted for “lethal removal.” The activists have also launched a public relations campaign to try to lobby the government to spare the bear’s life.
The bear in question is a young mother, with a cub by her side. She is known to the government as “Sow #753,” while bear activists and their hundreds of thousands of social media followers call her “Hope.” They call her cub “Bounce.” (The state of California does not approve of naming bears because authorities believe wild animals should not be anthropomorphized.)
Whatever she is called, Hope/Sow #753 has a long history with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. She has been on the department’s radar since 2022, according to wildlife officials. But this summer, she took things up a notch. She has been linked, via her DNA, to more than a dozen home break-ins in the South Lake Tahoe area since mid-July, state wildlife officials say.
On Aug. 21, she and her cub broke into a home on Butler Avenue in South Lake Tahoe and accidentally lighted a burner on the gas stove while rummaging through the kitchen.
“This bear and its cub came very close to igniting a fire and burning down a house, and potentially creating a forest fire,” said Peter Tira, spokesperson for the Department of Fish and Wildlife.
A staff member at Fish and Wildlife who was in the area happened to smell the gas and called 911.
As emergency responders dealt with that situation, mother and cub fled up a nearby tree.
The Fish and Wildlife staff member stood below to monitor them.
The staffer was holding a paintball gun, which is often used to haze bears. But when some in the community saw it, they feared that it was a real gun, and that the bears were at risk of being shot.
The Bear League, an organization that works to protect bears by teaching people to coexist with them, blasted out an urgent message to its 200,000 Facebook followers: “NEWSBREAK: Hope and Bounce are currently high up in a tree on the 2000 block of Butler Avenue in South Lake Tahoe, and Fish and Wildlife are there and we know they have issued a standing order to kill Hope. If you are in the area, please go act as a respectful witness.
People began rushing to the scene. Many of them were furious at Fish and Wildlife. “How would they like it if an ex-USMC sniper came to protect those bears?” one man wrote on the Bear League’s Facebook page.
Eventually, the police were called to defuse the situation.
Ever since, said Ann Bryant, the executive director of the Bear League, teams of volunteers have tried to stick by the bear at all times, to protect her from being killed by Fish and Wildlife.
“We have some people who are sleeping out in the wilderness at night,” Bryant said, adding that they do so because the bear’s “life has meaning, and she wants to live and she has a baby. We don’t want her to be murdered.”
Bryant said she would like the mother bear and her cub to be left alone, but if Fish and Wildlife won’t allow that, she wants the bear to be trapped and transported to a bear sanctuary out of state, while her cub could be rehabilitated and released back into the wild.
She noted that the Department of Fish and Wildlife has often been reluctant to send bears to out-of-state havens, but hopes that the lobbying that has been unleashed on the department “from people all over the world” who are “extremely upset about her potential death” will help sway officials.
Tira, of the Department of Fish and Wildlife, said bears sent to sanctuaries often fail to thrive and “have to be on antidepressant medications.”
“Shipping California wildlife all over the place is not necessarily a long-term solution,” he said.
But it was clear to officials, he said, that something had to be done about this particular bear.
“It’s a dangerous situation,” he said. “We know this bear has broken into at least a half a dozen [homes] just within the last week. This is not normal bear behavior.”
Still, he added: “Things in Lake Tahoe are very emotionally charged with this bear.”
Bryant and other bear activists have been keeping up a regular stream of updates on their efforts to keep the bear from being killed. They also dispute the idea that Hope/Sow #753 is particularly badly behaved.
“She has not done much more than walk in through unlocked doors and windows,” Bryant said, adding that once the bodyguard operation was launched, the bear is now being constantly watched and hazed away from homes when she tries to get in.
“She has never even bluff charged anybody. She’s absolutely 10 times better than some of the other mama bears down in that area,” Bryant said, adding that the real problem was that some homeowners in the neighborhood were not being responsible about their garbage or closing and locking their doors and windows and “she is being scapegoated.”
Despite the brouhaha over Hope/Sow #753, officials said there has not been a huge uptick in bear conflict this summer in Lake Tahoe.
Since May 1, officials said, there have been 170 incidents of bear-related property damage reported to the state, along with 18 cases of “general nuisance” caused by bears and two unspecified public safety incidents.
In 2024, there were a total of 521 reports of property damage. The total was 607 in 2023; the first and only known instance of a person being killed by a bear was recorded in California that year: a 71-year-old woman in Downieville who was partially eaten by an animal who broke into her home.
Bears have also continued to draw social media attention for their food-lusting foibles. On Aug. 17, four days before the standoff on Butler Avenue, deputies from the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office found a bear inside an ice-cream store in South Lake Tahoe and snapped a photo. It went viral.
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