An Alaska national park’s yearly celebration of the beefy, brown and bristly is getting underway as some of the chunkiest bears on the planet fatten up for their long winter slumber.
Fat Bear Week doesn’t officially start at Katmai National Park and Preserve until Oct. 2, when fans can begin voting online for their favorite ursine behemoths in tournament-style brackets.
Fat Bear Week
Grazer, the winner of the 2023 Fat Bear Contest, wades through a river in Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska in September 2023.
But on Tuesday, organizers revealed the four cub contestants in this week’s Fat Bear Jr. contest — with the “chubby champ charging on to face the corpulent competition” in the adult bracket, as Naomi Boak of the nonprofit Katmai Conservancy put it during a livestreamed announcement.
The annual contest, which drew more than 1.3 million votes last year, is a way to celebrate the resiliency of the 2,200 brown bears that live in the preserve on the Alaska Peninsula, which extends from the state’s southwest corner toward the Aleutian Islands. The most dedicated fans watch the bears on live cameras at explore.org all summer as they feast on sockeye salmon returning to the Brooks River.