Image of Bear Starting Then Riding Chairlift at Vail Resort, CO, Goes Viral

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This bear allegedly started this chairlift at Vail, CO, before riding it for two hours. Credit: Facebook

Well, this is an ‘interesting’ one. So, I’m just going to leave this image here, along with the caption that accompanied it on the Facebook post, for you to make your own mind up.

This was on the news. A full-grown brown bear is safe after a nearly two-hour ride on a chair-lift at a ski resort near Vail, Colorado!

Somehow, the bear got aboard the ski-lift and managed to activate the lift and turn it on!

Authorities are unsure how the incident occurred but they do have a surveillance photo of two bears, one smaller, probably a “cub”, and another full-grown, milling about in the area earlier that day.

Thoughts?!


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15 thoughts on “Image of Bear Starting Then Riding Chairlift at Vail Resort, CO, Goes Viral

  1. This is very fake because there aren’t any hall chairlifts in Vail, and chairlifts can only turn on if It has at least 2 operators on either side.

  2. A chairlift needs to be started at both top and bottom for it to run, the drive side starts it but not without a ready from the other side. Not only that, but at the end of the day they are turned off with a key at both ends. It seems highly unlikely that a bear would be able to do this unless there was some assistance from a human. My gut tells me this was staged but that also seems as unlikely. Very odd.

    1. This is clarification that I needed. I was wondering why no person ever did this at a resort during the summer. Based on your input, I think that there may have been some maintenance work ongoing and the bear got on a chair. It would be really bad if the maintenance guys saw their chance and started the chair turning when the bear sat on a chair.

  3. There are no brown bears in Colorado. One often will mistake a cinnamon bear but it’s a type of black bear.

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