A record year: What made ‘Fat Bear Week’ 2025 so compelling

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) - With a new champion of “Fat Bear Week” crowned, Alaskans can look back on this year’s competition and celebrate what makes it so compelling.

The latest winner of the annual bracket-style competition, in which people vote daily for the fattest — or simply their favorite — bear in Katmai National Park, was “Chunk,” a hefty bruin who is estimated to weigh around 1,200 pounds.

Chunk defeated bear 856 with a grand total of 96,350 votes. The runner-up bear, which doesn’t have a nickname, finished with 63,725 votes, according to Katmai National Park officials.

Mike Fitz — who calls himself the “resident naturalist” with Explore.org, the livestreaming platform that hosts the popular bear cams at Brooks Falls in Katmai National Park — said this year set the record for most votes ever with 1.7 million between the bracket that lasted a week and the “Fat Bear Junior” competition that preceded the main contest.

Fitz — who is the creator of the contest — said he did not expect such a surge in statewide and national interest after the first year in 2014 attracted only about 1,700 votes.

“We put it on Katmai’s Facebook page at the time, that was really kind of, like, the only medium that we thought we could get the word out about it, and people voted with their likes or their reactions,” Fitz explained.

The rise of the competition has likely been fueled in several ways, Fitz speculated, pointing out that teachers in classrooms across the state and country have used it to educate young minds about the big bears — which are some of the largest in the country — and the habitats they reside in.

“Maybe there’s geography lessons involved in there about where Katmai National Park is, for example, and conservation messages as well that they can utilize with their students,” Fitz said. “So that’s definitely part of it.”

He also believes that the general public hearing about it as a weird and wacky voting competition has helped expose it to the public, which continues to return each year to vote for their favorite bear.

Fitz said this year’s bracket was “unpredictable” with the way it played out.

“There were so many well-deserving bears on there,” Fitz said. “Not only were they fat, but they also had really powerful stories behind them.”

Fitz said he wasn’t confident that Chunk would even advance past the second round due to one tough competitor he was facing.

“He was matched against a very big female — number 901 — and she is just a balloon," he said. “In fact, we saw her on the webcams just the other day, just looking really, really round.”

To make Chunk’s story more fascinating, he had to fight to put on the pounds this summer while dealing with a broken jaw, an injury that can be a death knell for wild animals.

Nevertheless, Chunk survived and thrived with the injury.

“He’s had to persevere through that pain, that injury,” Fitz said. “It’ll become a permanent disability for him, it’ll never heal back to normal, so we’ve really watched him throughout the summer adapt to that injury, and he survived very well.

“He remains one of the biggest and most dominant bears at Brooks River.”

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