Quick Take
- The 2026 champion nearly didn't survive to compete, and his survival story involves no human help whatsoever. His survival story →
- Winning Fat Bear Week apparently runs in the family, though the bloodline connection is stranger than it sounds.
- The bear that lost the final may have had the harder summer, and the rangers think she deserves just as much credit. Why 910 still wins →
- Fat Bear Week started as a single-day vote with a tiny audience, and what it has become now is almost unrecognizable. From 1,700 to millions →
Bear 89, known to viewers as Backpack, has won the 2026 Fat Bear Week competition at Katmai National Park in Alaska, beating bear 910 by 103,344 votes to 98,253, just over half the poll. The online tournament, now in its 12th year, asks the public to pick which of the park’s brown bears did the best job packing on weight before winter, and this year drew about 2.5 million votes, according to local reporting.
Backpack’s win keeps the title in the family. His mother, bear 435, known as Holly, won Fat Bear Week herself in 2019.
How The Bracket Works
Sixteen adult bears entered this year’s contest, split into four brackets: mother bears, single females, sub-adult bears and adult males. Each round pits two bears against each other, and the one with more public votes advances, much like a basketball tournament. Along the way, defending champion bear 32, known as Chunk, was knocked out in the first round, reportedly still nursing a broken mandible, a broken canine and broken front teeth while somehow continuing to gain weight.
Backpack’s own path to the final was close. He trailed bear 164, known as Bucky, for most of a day in the semifinal before pulling ahead by roughly 3,000 votes, a race Katmai park ranger Sarah Bruce called “unprecedented.” In the final against bear 910, a mother bear and the daughter of a previous champion, Backpack’s margin held at just over 50 percent of the vote, CBS News reported.
A Cub Who Almost Didn’t Make It
Backpack’s size today makes his early years easy to forget. Holly first brought him to the Brooks River as a cub in 2006, and he earned his nickname by riding on her back rather than swimming alongside her. Around age 2, he suffered a serious leg injury that left him struggling to walk, and park rangers were unsure he would survive. He pulled through without direct human intervention, leaning on his mother through the recovery, and became independent in 2008. He has since grown into one of the river’s largest males.
Why Every Bear In The Contest Already Won
Fat Bear Week exists because a heavy bear going into winter is a bear with a real chance of making it through hibernation. As Bruce put it, “a fat bear is a successful bear.” That framing extends even to bears who lose their bracket matchups. Bear 910 arrived at the final as a mother who had spent the summer fattening up while also feeding and protecting cubs of her own, a feat Bruce called “really cool to see.” Chunk’s first-round exit didn’t erase a summer spent still gaining weight through a mouth full of broken teeth.
By that standard, Backpack’s title is less about beating 910 and more about confirming what Katmai’s rangers already believed: every bear who shows up heavy enough to compete has already done the hard part.
Fat Bear Week began in 2014 as a small, one-day vote with fewer than 1,700 ballots cast. This year’s tournament ran across multiple rounds over more than a week and pulled in roughly 2.5 million votes, up from about 1.7 million the year before, a sign of how far the contest has grown beyond the handful of bear cam regulars who first started it.
