Fat Bear Week began on Monday at Katmai national park, launching the 12th annual public vote for the fattest of the park’s brown bears. The tournament runs from 22 to 29 September, and the bracket is set to drop on Friday.
The event is built for a simple question with a lot of staying power: which bear has put on the most weight before winter hibernation? Last year, more than 1.7 million votes came in from 100 countries, and Bear 32, nicknamed Chunk, took the title. That kind of turnout is why the contest has become a fixture rather than a novelty. It gives people a way to follow individual bears across the season, and it turns a remote stretch of Alaska into a place millions watch at once.
Fat Bear Week began in 2014, after the park first posted a bracket on Facebook and early posts drew what one longtime observer described as super high engagement. It started as Fat Bear Tuesday, before growing into a weeklong event. Explore.org installed livestream cameras in 2012, giving viewers a steady look at the bears around Brooks river and Brooks Camp. The park is about 260 miles southwest of Anchorage and home to approximately 2,200 brown bears, with tens of millions of salmon returning to the region each year.
That salmon is the reason the whole event exists. The bears are celebrated for fattening up, but they can only do it because the runs are there to feed on. Rangers have seen hundreds of thousands of salmon moving along Brooks river, and that seasonal surge is what makes the bears visible, competitive and easy to compare in side-by-side photos. Mark Sturm said there are more cubs at Brooks Camp this year than have been seen in a long time, a reminder that the contest is tied to more than appearances. A well-fed brown bear is more likely to have cubs in the den and a large litter, and the spectacle on the screen is really a measure of survival.
Friday’s bracket release will answer the question viewers are waiting for now: which bears are in this year’s field. Once that list is public, the vote will settle into its familiar rhythm, with the public weighing photos, livestream clips and the bears’ size as the contest moves toward the Sept. 29 finish.
