While working out at the gym early Monday morning, David Miler got a call from a Powell police dispatcher with a disturbing message.

“Don't go outside because you have a grizzly bear in your tree,” Miler recalled being told.

He thought it was a joke, but the dispatcher replied that she was very serious. Miler accidentally hung up the phone, in a panic to reach his wife, Rea. She was due to leave the house on South Evarts Street to take one of their four children to see a physician in Billings.

“I was frantically trying to call her to make sure she picked up the phone,” he said.

Rea answered the phone and couldn’t believe what she was hearing from her husband: “Don't let the dogs out. Don't let the kids out. There’s a grizzly bear in our tree.”

She similarly thought he was kidding. Rea went to a window facing the tree, about 15 feet from the front door, and saw what looked like a brown “blob,” she said. “Then he turned his head around the corner of the trunk and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a bear.’”

By the time David got home from the gym, the police department had shut the whole neighborhood down to capture what turned out to be a roughly 4-year-old black bear.

Nydia Jurado was the first to see the bruin in town early Monday. She was preparing to take the garbage out to the bins in the alley when she spotted the cinnamon-colored bear. She immediately called her husband, saying there was a grizzly in the backyard. Her husband, Roberto Lopez, didn’t believe what he was hearing.

Having been asleep, Lopez sprung up and went out to have a look. He quickly returned to the safety of the house and called 911 at 5:09 a.m.

“There’s a lot of children running around this neighborhood and I didn’t want anyone to get hurt,” Lopez said. “It was a small bear, but it is still dangerous.”

Lopez kept an eye on the animal — ultimately determined to be a black bear — until police arrived.

Sgt. Matt McCaslin saw it briefly, near a tree on Jefferson Street, between South Day and South Clark, then the bear took off and briefly eluded the pursuing officers. Ultimately, Officer Kevin Bennett found the bear in the Milers’ tree, about a half-a-block and a few yards and fences away.

At that point, “it turned into a bear-icaded subject,” McCaslin quipped.

Powell Game Warden Chris Queen soon responded to the scene to assist. However, as the team waited for Wyoming Game and Fish Department biologists to arrive with tranquilizers and a cage, the bruin began looking for an escape route.

Police officers helped with the effort to keep the bear contained to the tree.

“There were a couple of times, it wanted to come out,” McCaslin said, while the officers and warden “were trying to spook it back up into the tree to keep it there.”

“We kind of hollered at it and made a bunch of noise,” the sergeant said. Meanwhile, Queen grabbed one of the bicycles in the Milers’ yard, moving toward the bear with the bike over his head and making noises, McCaslin said.

Rea said the bear responded by growling and swatting at the trio with its big paws. 

“It did huff at us and it wasn’t real happy,” McCaslin said.

“They backed off a little bit after that,” Rea recalled. “He [the bear] stood up and was holding on the tree looking around, and then he just bolted right up.”

Luke Ellsbury and Phil Quick, Game and Fish large carnivore team members, arrived at the house soon after. The bear was well hidden in the leaves, so to get a good shot, they climbed on the roof of a neighbors garage. The bear, leery of the advances by the team, started coming down the tree.

“Probably about halfway down, [the biologist] ended up getting him in the shoulder,” Rea said.

The Milers’ children, KeyTon, 13, Kellon, 5, Kolten, 3, and Kenadee, 2, all had their noses pressed to the windows on the south side of the house. “Kolten kept coming to the door and trying to come out. I was like, ‘NO,’” Rea said.

With the dart in him, the bear climbed down to a board used as a treehouse platform and passed out. After a few pokes with a stick, the team determined the bear was unconscious and immediately got him out of the tree and loaded him into a waiting cage.

“They did an amazing job,” Queen said of the two biologists.

Powell police cleared the scene just before 8 a.m.

It’s anyone’s guess as to how long the bear might have been in the area and what it might have been doing. But Dennis Shultz, who lives a couple miles south of town on Lane 11, is pretty sure a bear got into his beehives on Saturday and Sunday nights, knocking them down.

Although the bees seem to have endured the encounters OK, Shultz said he found scrape marks on one of the hive frames and claw marks on the ditch bank near the hives.

“It looked like a small bear,” he said.

On Monday, Shultz had a conversation with a friend in Gardiner, Montana — just north of Yellowstone National Park — who also maintains hives but has never had trouble with the bears that roam the area.

“... Of all the places in the world to get a bear, you’d think it’d be in Gardiner, but not Powell,” he mused.

It was also the first in-town bear encounter for McCaslin, who’s had calls involving “mountain lions and badgers and several other things” over the years.

During the brief time the black bear laid on the ground in the Milers’ yard, just a few steps away from their house, David took the opportunity to take a selfie.

“It's something that you hear about, living here in Wyoming. But never something that you ever expect to have somebody call you and tell you,” he said.

Added Rea, “I hope it’s a once in a lifetime experience.”

The black bear was transported to more suitable habitat in the North Fork area, east of Yellowstone, Queen said.

“It didn’t do anything wrong; it was just in the wrong place,” the warden said. “We like to see them, just not in town.”