09/18/2026
In July 2019, Colorado Parks and Wildlife officer Jared Lamb was surveying bighorn sheep and mountain goats in the Mount Evans Wilderness when he noticed something through his spotting scope that made no sense.
A young bull elk was walking through the mountains with a car tire completely around his neck.
The elk was far back in the wilderness. There was no practical way to reach him that day, and he disappeared into the timber.
For the next two years, he became one of Colorado’s strangest wildlife mysteries.
Trail cameras photographed him near Conifer in 2020. Residents occasionally reported seeing him. Wildlife officers tried repeatedly to get close enough with a tranquilizer dart.
Each time, the bull vanished again.
By then, the tire had become part of his silhouette.
He grew larger.
His antlers grew.
And every year the object around his neck became harder to imagine removing.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife believed the tire must have slipped over his head when he was younger and had no antlers, or during winter after he had shed them. Exactly where he found it was never known.
Then, on October 9, 2021, a resident near Pine Junction, Colorado called wildlife officer Dawson Swanson.
The elk was in the neighborhood.
Swanson arrived and found him traveling with a herd of roughly 40 elk.
He was no longer the young bull first seen through a spotting scope.
He was now estimated to be 4½ years old, more than 600 pounds, with five points on each antler.
And the tire was still there.
Swanson spent the evening trying to get within range.
Several times he almost had a shot with the tranquilizer dart, only for another elk, a branch, or the terrain to block him.
It was already the fourth attempt that week to capture the animal.
Shortly before dark, everything finally lined up.
Swanson fired the dart.
The bull ran with the herd into thick timber.
When officers found him, the sedation had not worked as strongly as expected — the elk was in the middle of the rut and in powerful physical condition.
They had limited time.
They tried to cut the tire.
They couldn’t.
A steel reinforcement bead ran through the rubber, and their saw was taking too long.
The obvious alternative was the one they had hoped to avoid.
They cut off his antlers.
Not because the antlers were injured.
Not because the elk needed them removed.
They simply could not slide the tire over them.
Once the five-point antlers were gone, officers Dawson Swanson and Scott Murdoch began working the tire over the bull’s head.
Even then, it was tight.
They had to twist and position it carefully until, after more than two years, the tire finally came free.
Then they discovered something hidden inside it.
The lower half of the tire had slowly become a container.
Rainwater, dirt and forest debris had collected inside as the elk moved through the mountains.
It was packed with roughly 10 pounds of wet pine needles and dirt.
Between the tire, the debris and the antlers that had to be removed, wildlife officers estimated that the bull suddenly became about 35 pounds lighter.
For an animal that had carried the object for roughly half of his life, officers expected his neck to be badly damaged.
Instead, they found something surprising.
The hair had been rubbed away in places and there was one small wound, roughly the size of a nickel or quarter.
Otherwise, the neck was in remarkably good condition.
Within minutes of receiving the drug that reversed the tranquilizer, the bull was back on his feet.
Then he returned to the wild.
His antlers would grow again.
The tire would not.
There is still no definitive answer for how it happened.
Perhaps he pushed his head into a discarded tire while young.
Perhaps someone had used a tire as a feeder.
Perhaps he encountered it during winter, when bull elk carry no antlers.
The beginning of the story was never witnessed.
Only the result was.
For more than two years, an animal weighing hundreds of pounds traveled between Park and Jefferson counties, through forest and mountain terrain, carrying an object made for a car.
People saw him only occasionally.
Officers kept looking.
And when they finally reached him, the solution was unexpectedly simple and brutal-looking:
to remove the thing around his neck, they first had to remove the antlers that prevented it from coming off.
The photographs taken afterward show two wildlife officers holding the old tire beside the sedated bull.
By itself, it looks like discarded trash.
But for that elk, it had been something else entirely:
35 pounds of rubber, steel, dirt, wet pine needles — and two years of his life.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife later used the case to remind residents that elk, deer, moose and bears regularly become trapped in human objects including hammocks, swing sets, tomato cages, sports nets, holiday lights, laundry baskets and tires.
The elk had survived his.
Mostly by luck.
And after October 9, 2021, he finally walked back into the Colorado forest without it.
Sources:
Colorado Parks and Wildlife / Colorado Outdoors — After Two Years, Elk Has Tire Removed From Neck
CBS Colorado — Wildlife Officers Remove Tire Elk Wore for Two Years
