At the time, NPS told news outlets<\/a> \u201chopefully\u201d Fat Bear Week wouldn\u2019t be postponed. After all, it\u2019s a highly anticipated event: current rangers said the bracket-style internet competition has grown wildly in popularity since it started in 2014 as a single-day contest. Last year saw more than one million votes cast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But in Washington, D.C., as in Katmai National Park, anything can happen. At the last minute, Congress averted a shutdown, <\/a>which means it ain\u2019t over until the fat bear wins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With voting set to open Oct. 4, Mike Fitz,<\/a> the former park ranger who started Fat Bear Week, said part of the draw is that no two competitions are the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEvery year is unique at Brooks River,\u201d the Explore.org<\/a> naturalist said in an interview. \u201cEvery year has one or more special stories to tell.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some years see rookie bears enter the competition, challenging the prowess of past years\u2019 winners who return for another claim to the heavyweight title. Some years, there are mothers with cubs \u2014 adopted or biological. In \u201cLast year, we saw two mother bears \u2014 sisters \u2014 basically become an integrated family with their own cubs,\u201d Fitz said. \u201cThey traveled together, they fished together, they played together, they rested together, they let their cubs take fish from everyone. It was behavior that we had never seen between two mother bears before.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Regardless of who wins, rangers are just happy to see bulkiness across the board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBear fat equals success,\u201d said Felicia Jimenez, an interpretive ranger at Katmai. \u201cGaining those critical fat reserves is super, super important. Bears, when they enter the den for hibernation, they don\u2019t eat, they don\u2019t drink, they don\u2019t defecate or urinate. They\u2019re purely living off of those fat reserves. And during that time, when they\u2019re in hibernation, when they come out of the den, they can lose up to a third of their body weight. So gaining that weight is very, very critical, and gaining enough fat is very high stakes for them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\nA public outreach tool<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
2019, the sockeye salmon population ballooned <\/a>and a smorgasbord of fish brought out behaviors in bears that would\u2019ve been subverted by instincts for food competition. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Fitz recalls viewership spiked as people were housebound, perhaps looking for a proverbial breath of fresh air.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/AP23272673697223.jpg.jpg\")