‘Unbearable’ bear holed up under Altadena home finally takes off – 6 weeks later

For over six weeks, Ken Johnson had an unexpected and unwanted housemate– a 550-pound male bear.

But with the assistance of the Lake Tahoe BEAR League, the animal finally exited from under Johnson’s house on Tuesday, Jan. 6, much to the homeowner’s relief.

After several unsuccessful attempts by Johnson and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to drive the bear out by using scented lures and loud noises, the BEAR League fired off paintball guns to irritate the bear, who eventually squeezed out from underneath the house.

Dave Fleishman, who has worked as a responder with the BEAR League for three and a half years, chased the animal with a paintball gun after his colleague had crawled under the house – with the bear – and fired a few paintball rounds into the ground to spook the animal.

“He stopped between the crawl space and the driveway, and I thought he changed his mind and he was gonna turn around and come back,” Fleishman said.

That necessitated a few more paintball rounds.

“It’s not something that is unusual in the bear world,” Fleishman said of the paintball method. “They really don’t like the sound. They don’t like the dirt flying.”

Johnson said the balls don’t harm the bear.

“You’ve got to understand, these paintballs are the same ones that their people use for recreational games. They get a hit and it leaves a bruise and it hurts, but if they do, it’s fine,” he said.

While the homeowner was surprised that BEAR League responders go under houses with the bears, Fleishman said it is common to get bears out of crawlspaces. Bears are conflict-avoidant and want to get away from humans, he said.

“It’s just part of what we do. There’s all these fairytales about how scary bears are and how unpredictable bears are,” he said, “but in my personal experience, bears are a lot more predictable in distress than humans are.”

The bear, who a friend of Johnson’s nicknamed “Unbearable,” had been under the home since Nov. 25. It’s been over six weeks.

The BEAR League was able to get him out in roughly ten minutes.

Johnson provided the responders with detailed charts and photos of the space, marking where vents were, which allowed the BEAR League to come in with a game plan.

“It took a lot longer for us to get there than it did for us to get the bear out,” Fleishman joked. The nonprofit does work in Lake Tahoe, but reached out to Johnson after seeing what he had been going through with the bear, and traveled down to Altadena to help.

When they respond to bear issues in Lake Tahoe, they are mostly familiar with each one they deal with, and what might be the best technique to use to get them to leave.

“We’re familiar with who they are, what their personalities are. This was a total stranger bear to us,” Fleishman said.

As the bear remained under Johnson’s house for weeks, crowds of neighbors and media types flocked to his property to catch a glimpse of the massive animal.

The bear tried to return to Johnson’s home after the paintball episode, but he came back to a fortified crawl space. Johnson had boarded up the entrance to the underside of his house with plywood and added a mat that gives the bear an uncomfortable shock when stepped on.

So the bear took off again.

Johnson will now assess the damage left by the bear, including to the home’s gas line, a destroyed grate over the entrance to the crawl space and damage to ducts, he said.

He’ll need to turn his gas back on, get his hot water going again and clear out the crawl space to determine how bad the problems are.

“I used to smell this sort of musty, sweat odor because he was right near the front door and those vents would fit up. Now I don’t have to worry about the destruction or anything if I’m running around with the cat, scaring the bear to move to another spot or something like that,” Johnson said.

Despite the troubles, he has some fondness for the creature that shared his space.

“A lot of the neighbors have seen this bear before and kind of think of him fondly,” he said.

And he’d like to see the bear around, but at a distance.

“I do hope I see him again, walking through the yard. That wouldn’t be too bad,” Johnson said. “Just not under my house again.”

550-pound bear settles in beneath an Altadena home, thwarting creative efforts to move him out