‘Chunk’ reigns supreme as Fat Bear Week concludes on Alaska’s Katmai Peninsula

After a weeklong battle to the finish, brown bear Chunk is victorious.

The annual Fat Bear Week competition, now in its 11th year, honours feeding season at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska and this year’s title goes to 32 Chunk, who weighed in at more than 1,200 pounds.

Viewers tune in to watch a livestream of brown bears feeding at Brooks Falls, a salmon run in the park, while they get ready to hibernate. Then viewers vote on which bear is the biggest, chunkiest ursine creature around in a sports-inspired bracket.

This year’s competition was stacked, including a first-time appearance by an offspring of Grazer, the winner of the past two Fat Bear Week contests. Grazer, who was in the field again this year, was knocked out of the running by 856, the bear who would ultimately place second behind the behemoth 32 Chunk, known by fans simply as Chunk.

Both 856 and Chunk sailed into the final after handily defeating their respective competitors in the semifinal round, nabbing 76,665 and 82,913 votes respectively.

In the finals, Chunk ran away with the title, garnering 96,350 votes to 856’s 63,725.

Despite his stature, Chunk was something of an underdog at the start of this year’s contest. He arrived at the river with a broken jaw, according to Mike Fitz, a former park ranger and resident naturalist at Explore.org, the media organization that helps host Fat Bear Week. Bears in the park do not receive medical care, Fitz said in an interview at the start of the competition.

The injury could not only have knocked Chunk out of the race, but could have even endangered his life, as he had to learn how to reassert dominance and get enough fish to eat without full use of his mouth. Fitz said Chunk showed great “adaptability,” and took care to avoid confrontations with other male bears.

“Chunk certainly was resilient in his efforts to get fat this year,” Fitz said.

To be considered for the bracket, bears must be present at the river throughout the summer so rangers can capture before-and-after photographs that demonstrate just how much weight each animal has gained. The bears can eat more than 50,000 calories per day during their salmon feeding frenzy.

The pictures helped 856 in his journey through this year’s competition.

“The early summer and late summer photos of 856 seem to have captured his dramatic transformation in body mass,” Fitz wrote in an email on the last day of Fat Bear Week. While Chunk came out on top, the side-by-side comparisons of 856 from June to September is quite staggering.

This year’s contest continued the upward trajectory of Fat Bear Week, with the 1.6 million total votes representing the most in the contest’s history, according to competition data.

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