Located in Southwest Alaska, Katmai National Park and Preserve is well known for a few things: its rugged, mountainous beauty, its isolation from the rest of the world and its bears. According to its website, over 2,200 brown bears call Katmai home.
Throughout the summer, the bears focus on getting enough food for winter, hunting salmon and feeding off the vegetation present in the forests of the park, the rivers and the Pacific coastline. As a result, these bears can nearly double their weight in one summer, gaining enough to live off throughout their hibernation.
Katmai National Park and Preserve noticed how much weight these bears were putting on, and created Fat Bear Week. Every year, the fattest bears compete head-to-head in a tournament to see which bear is the fattest.
The festivities kick off in late September with Fat Bear Junior, in which the cubs get to compete in a bracket of their own. The voting for Fat Bear Junior has passed and a yearling cub nicknamed 806 Jr., after his mother, 806, was crowned Fat Bear Junior Champion, giving him a chance to advance to the main bracket.
As for the main bracket, voting began Oct. 4 and is set to continue into next week, with voting opening from noon to 9 p.m. EST.
This year brings a variety of contenders, namely some of the past champions of the competition.
For one thing, Otis, the bear who won the first Fat Bear Tuesday in 2014 and has won more than any other competitor, has returned to the area and is back in the competition. He has racked up a whopping four titles, but his age might be starting to show. When he was first spotted in Katmai National Park in 2001, he was already between four to six years old, which would put him around 26 to 28 years old now.
For reference, brown bears typically live about 20 to 30 years in the wild, but some have lived to see year 35. Either way, this puts Otis among the oldest bears in the park, which means that he loses out to younger, stronger bears for preferred fishing spots. This also led to a devastating loss in the competition for him last year.
The old bear lost to a relatively new contender, identified as 747 and nicknamed “Bear Force One.” And voters can see why as the bear is an absolute unit that is quite literally built like the airplane it’s named after.
Another fan favorite returning to Fat Bear Week is Holly, a massive adult female bear who won back in 2019.
The competition is also bringing in a wide variety of new contenders, with bears of all sizes and fur colors competing for the title of Fat Bear Week Champion, and voters are excited to see what this year's competition will bring.
