Call it the ultimate ode to ursine obesity. Each October, more than 1 million people worldwide take to the internet to crown the winner of Fat Bear Week in Alaska’s Katmai National Park.
The single-elimination bracket—think March Madness for brown bears—features photos of 12 contestants before and after they’ve bulked up for winter hibernation. And it’s not just about looks. Heft matters, of course, but so do the chunky contenders’ stories, says Naomi Boak, ’74, a co-producer of Fat Bear Week.
“I tell people it’s like watching five soap operas a day,” says Boak, who spent four years as a Katmai media ranger, living part-time in a cabin with a bear’s-eye view. Tournament co-organizer Explore.org features footage from nine livestreams around Brooks River, where the yearly sockeye salmon run draws 80 to 100 brown bears. Viewers watch in real time as males jostle for their spots in the hierarchy and females lose cubs to illness, but also as the bears find love on the river and babysit for one another. Last year, many fans on the Fat Bear Week discussion board rooted for reigning champ Grazer (Bear 128), whose two cubs had been swept over a waterfall and toward the most dominant bear on the river (Chunk, Bear 32). “She immediately went after Chunk, and Chunk is two to three times her size,” says Boak. Though one cub later died from his injuries, Grazer’s quick action saved the other. Mama bear went on to capture a second consecutive title.
Photo: Naomi Boak
Livestream viewers become deeply attached to the individual bears, whom they watch year after year and can often identify by sight. The familiarity breeds support, according to a study on Katmai’s “virtual tourists” by two economists who estimated that each brown bear could generate $70 to $140 per person per year, or about $260,000 per bear, in donations to preservation efforts.
While Boak has not lived among the bears since 2023, she will return to the park several times this year on behalf of the Katmai Conservancy to photograph them as they fatten up for the 11th annual competition. It may seem a far cry from her original career as an Emmy-winning public television producer and a showrunner for a Court TV comedy program. But in another sense, it’s not all that different.
“There’s tension. There’s drama,” she says. “I’m a storyteller. The stories are there.”
Kali Shiloh is a staff writer at Stanford. Email her at kshiloh@stanford.edu.
