Fat Bear Week began Monday at Katmai National Park, and the public is back to vote for the fattest brown bear. The 12th annual tournament opens with a different backdrop this year: more cubs at Brooks Camp than have been seen in a long time.
Mark Sturm said there are more cubs at Brooks Camp this year than have been seen in a long time. That lands alongside a contest built around weight gain, which turns every image into evidence and every vote into a seasonal check on how the bears are doing.
Face Off: 12th annual Fat Bear Week begins at Katmai national park traces the mechanics of the event. The bracket drops on Friday, then the tournament runs from 22 to 29 September, so the public has a short window to compare the bears before the elimination rounds begin.
Mike Fitz and the cameras
Mike Fitz said, "The engagement on those few Facebook posts that we did was super high, like way higher than anything we had tried at the park previously." He was a National Park Service ranger at Katmai when the event started as Fat Bear Tuesday in 2014, and he is now the resident naturalist at Explore.org.
In 2012, Explore.org installed livestream cameras in Katmai National Park, giving the tournament a second life beyond static bracket images. Fitz said, "One of the things that makes the webcam experience really special is that we get to follow the stories of individual bears, so we know them across the season and years," and added, "And that helps us to form deeper connections with them and tell their stories about surviving in the wild."
Brooks River and the bears
Katmai National Park is home to approximately 2,200 brown bears, and the setting matters because every year, tens of millions of salmon return to this region. Fitz said, "Every year, tens of millions of salmon return to this region" and "Without salmon, there would be no Fat Bear Week."
He also said, "They’re amazing creatures in their own right, and they are the keystone of the ecosystem." Rangers have seen hundreds of thousands of salmon moving along Brooks River, which is the food engine behind the bears' late-season bulk-up and the images voters will use to choose a winner.
Chunk’s vote total
Last year drew more than 1.7m votes from 100 countries, a scale that explains why the bracket matters far beyond Katmai. Bear 32, nicknamed Chunk, took the title, and this year’s field will have to beat that level of attention if it wants to own the tournament narrative.
Fitz said, "We see a lot of ourselves in brown bears," and that is the operating logic of Fat Bear Week: the cameras make the remote park legible, but the bracket keeps the race competitive. With the bracket still to drop on Friday, the real question is which bears land in the draw and whether any can match Chunk’s run.
