A 1,000-pound grizzly named Backpack — known to rangers as Bear 89 — has been crowned this year's Fat Bear Week champion, and unlike recent winners, he got there by keeping the peace.
If you haven't come across Fat Bear Week, here's the setup: Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska hosts an annual online bracket where the public votes for the brown bear that has best bulked up before hibernation. Fans follow the bears on Explore.org's livestream as they fish the Brooks River, then vote tournament-style until one bear is named the fattest of them all. The stakes are real — bears that don't pack on enough fat risk running out of calories mid-winter and emerging from their dens when food is scarce.
The contest has had a rough run lately. In 2024, a dominant male called Chunk fatally injured a cub belonging to fellow contender Grazer, and viewers later watched one bear kill another along the river — disturbing enough that Explore.org and the Park Service paused the event for a special broadcast. Grazer beat Chunk in that year's finale, then Chunk came back to win in 2025 despite a broken jaw rangers attributed to a fight with another large male.
Enter Backpack: a 20-year-old who weighs roughly 1,000 pounds but rarely fights. Explore.org describes his approach as quiet strength — holding prime fishing spots through presence rather than aggression, and spending hours simply sitting on a favourite rock in the river. His backstory isn't all zen; as a cub he rode on his mother's back (hence the name), and in 2007 he arrived at the river with a leg injury serious enough that watchers doubted he'd survive. He's also, fittingly for the internet age, a bit of a nepo baby: his mother was Holly, the 2019 champion. Runner-up Bear 910 has champion bloodlines too.
Why does any of this matter to travellers? Fat Bear Week is one of the best free windows into a genuinely wild place. The Explore.org livestreams run through the salmon season at Brooks River, letting anyone watch brown bears fish for sockeye in real time — and for those keen to see it in person, Katmai is a real, if remote, destination: most visitors fly in from Anchorage by floatplane or small aircraft to Brooks Camp in July or September, when salmon runs draw dozens of bears to the falls. The annual contest, meanwhile, has become a beloved autumn tradition that draws global attention to the park and its conservation work.
Voters' embrace of a bear who'd rather sit than scrap says something about the audience as much as the animal. After years of drama in the bracket, the crowd picked the gentle giant. Fair enough — and a good excuse to queue up the bear cams and start planning a trip to Katmai.
Original source: Backpacker
