Ladies and Gentlebears, welcome to Fat Bear Week 2025!
This annual, week-long competition from Katmai National Park is a celebration of a summer’s worth of hard work, a hat tip to a healthy ecosystem and a collection of survival stories. The bears have been busy feasting on salmon and stocking up on nutrients for their winter hibernation, and they’ve got the fall bods to prove it.
What started as a one-day event in 2014 conjuring the attention of a few thousand nature conservancy social media followers has grown into a week-long event boasting 1.2 million votes last year. There are fat bear fans in every part of the country, fat bear curriculums in classrooms, fat bear campaign posters, fat bear Spotify playlists and, of course, fat bear bets on who will be crowned the champion.