The real winner of Fat Bear Week

Welcome to Fat Bear Week 2020! Katmai National Park and Preserve’s brown bears spent the summer gorging on 4,500-calorie salmon, and they've transformed into rotund giants, some over 1,000 pounds. The park held its annual playoff-like competition, voted on by the public, for the fattest of the fat bears between Sept. 30 and Oct. 6.

Imagine waking up in a hole on an Alaskan hill, after not eating for six months. You emerge and glimpse the blinding sun. You're gaunt. And you realize you must promptly devour as much food as possible before the winter, a time of unrelenting famine, strikes again.

Fat Bear Week is a celebration of how brown bears in Katmai National Park and Preserve achieve success in this harsh bear world. They do this by growing fat.

In 2020, the public voted bear 747 champion, and the honor is rightfully earned. His girth has amazed park rangers and naturalists alike.

Yet beyond livestreamed bears and online voting, the chilly autumn winds have already embraced Katmai. It's a place where dead, rotting salmon now float in the rivers, the grasses have yellowed, and the winter famine looms large. Here, all of these 12 enlarged bear contenders (and dozens more who don't make the contest), many of whom don't earn internet fame, are the true winners. Most of them, having succeeded in the wilds, will outlast the winter.

Yes, the adage "Everyone's a winner" for just showing up is annoying and trite. But the fat bears aren't just showing up at the game — they're winning. The fat bears we see on the bear cams today, from thousands of miles away, have won.

"Each bear in the 'competition' has found success in its own way," said Mike Fitz, a former Katmai park ranger and currently a resident naturalist for explore.org.

The genius of Fat Bear Week, thought up by Fitz in 2014, is that it's so engaging. People who have never heard of Katmai, and may never take a floatplane to get there, can see how the natural world, when conserved, can thrive. The two big bruisers in the finals this year, the dominant bears 747 and 32 (aka "Chunk"), are poignant examples of animals living and succeeding in an untrammeled landscape, where the world unfolds as it naturally must.

There, the competition is real.

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Chunk and 747 challenge other bears for survival, and as dominant bears, each other.

"While Chunk and 747 are pitted against each other in the Fat Bear Week finale, they are real-life competitors and rivals," said Fitz. At the top of the bear hierarchy, these bears challenge each other for the most productive fishing spots and mating opportunities, both of which are limited. And if all goes as planned, they'll do it again next year, too.

Though not official winners this year, many Katmai bears have sustained, ongoing stories of success.

• Holly, 2019's winner, once adopted (from the human perspective) an abandoned, helpless cub. That cub is now a successful adult bear (bear 503).

• Bear 856, eliminated in the first round this year, is the king of the Brooks River. For nearly a decade, he has been the river's most dominant bear.

• Bear 480, "Otis," is an aging bear with missing teeth. But still, he manages to catch bounties of fish in his spot beneath a waterfall. He's continually one of the fattest bears of the river.

In 2020, we all had the ability to witness (and vote on) bears who took advantage of a record-breaking salmon run, both into Katmai and up the Brooks River (some 800,000 salmon swam up the 1.5-mile river this summer). As a result, all the bears were fat this year.

"In July it was just phenomenal to see how many salmon were coming up the river," said Naomi Boak, the media ranger at Katmai National Park and Preserve. "This is a story about a very healthy ecosystem. It's about salmon that have cool enough and fresh enough water to thrive."

Indeed, Katmai is one of the wildest lands left in the U.S. It's barely developed. No roads or powerlines lead to the fat bears. Wolves, moose, wolverines, lynx, and eagles thrive there. The salmon have safe, untrammeled places to lay eggs. And the state of Alaska ensures that a healthy number of salmon swim up the rivers each year, rather than get swooped up by the region's hugely successful commercial fishing industry.

The fat bears are the ultimate product of wild lands kept wild. They are the top of the food chain, and they are flourishing. (Though the Trump administration has restarted a process to potentially allow an unprecedented copper and gold mine in the region's critical salmon habitat.)

This year's Fat Bear Week champion, 747, is an older, veteran bear. But the next generation is already succeeding, like bear 151 "Walker," a competitor in this year's contest. He'll almost certainly carry on the tradition, if given the chance.

"He's just coming into his prime," said Boak. "He's already really big."

"He's a bear to watch," she added.