The bracket drops Monday. Fat Bear Week — the single-elimination, internet-famous tournament where the public votes on which Katmai brown bear packed on the most weight before winter — runs September 22-29 this year, with the 12-bear (sometimes 16, the field moves around) matchup grid revealed September 18. It’s the 13th annual competition, run jointly by the National Park Service, the Katmai Conservancy, and explore.org since 2014, and it has somehow gotten bigger every single year since.

If you’ve watched before, you know the drill. If you haven’t: this is a bracket where the athletes are 1,000-pound salmon-gorging brown bears at Brooks Falls, Alaska, and the only qualification for voting is having an email address and an opinion about which bear looks most structurally sound for hibernation. It’s sillier than it sounds and more useful than it looks — the fat is survival, not vanity, and the whole event doubles as a real lesson in what a healthy salmon run does for an ecosystem.

Quick Verdict: Fat Bear Week 2026

Detail	Info
Bracket revealed	September 18, 2026
Voting window	September 22-29 (no voting the weekend of the 26th-27th)
Daily voting hours	Noon-9 p.m. Eastern / 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Pacific / 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Alaska
Champion crowned	September 29, 2026
Where to vote	explore.org, one vote per email per matchup
2025 defending champ	Bear 32 “Chunk” — won with a freshly broken jaw
What’s different in 2026	An unusually large cub population at Brooks River, plus a rough season of rare cub incidents
Cost to watch from home	Free, forever, via the live bear cams
Cost to see it in person	$1,000+ per person, realistically

What Is Fat Bear Week, and Why Does a National Park Run a Popularity Contest?

Fat Bear Week is an annual single-elimination bracket where the public votes to pick the fattest, most winter-ready brown bear at Katmai National Park’s Brooks River. It’s not a beauty contest. Bulk equals survival odds through hibernation, so a landslide win for the heaviest bear is really a vote for whichever animal did the best job of surviving the salmon run.

That reframe matters, because it’s the thing that keeps this from being just a cute internet meme with a bear cam attached. NPS biologists use the tournament as a teaching hook — every matchup comes with real notes on that bear’s summer, injuries and all — and it’s turned into one of the more effective wildlife-education stunts in the park system’s toolkit. Thirteen years running now, and it still spikes traffic on Katmai’s cams every fall.

The 2026 Dates, Laid Out

Here’s the full sequence, since “Fat Bear Week” is really three separate dates people conflate:

1. September 18 — The bracket is revealed. This year’s field of competitors gets locked in, matchups assigned, and explore.org posts downloadable brackets if you want to fill one out like it’s March Madness.
2. September 22-29 — Voting runs daily, noon to 9 p.m. Eastern, through explore.org’s polling widget. There’s no voting on the weekend (the 26th and 27th), so the schedule compresses into five real voting days.
3. September 29 — Finals close and a champion is crowned.

Worth flagging early: the timing sits right after our post on whether a shutdown was going to hit parks around September 30 this year. It didn’t — Congress funded the government through December 11 — so Fat Bear Week runs on schedule with NPS fully staffed. That’s not guaranteed every year. In 2018, a lapse in funding briefly threatened the event’s staffing, and it’s the kind of thing worth checking if you’re reading this any year other than 2026.

How Do You Watch Fat Bear Week?

You don’t need to be anywhere near Alaska. Here’s the actual mechanism:

1. Go to explore.org’s Fat Bear Week page during the voting window (Sept. 22-29, noon-9 p.m. Eastern).
2. Pick your bear from the day’s matchup and click or tap its photo.
3. Enter an email address — the system caps it at one vote per email per matchup, so no ballot-stuffing.
4. Refresh to see live results. The tally updates in real time as votes come in.
5. Watch the bears themselves on explore.org’s live Brooks Falls bear cams any time, vote or not — the cams run around the clock through the fall salmon season.

That’s it. No app, no account beyond the email, no cost. The whole thing is designed to be as frictionless as clicking a bracket square, which is a real part of why it’s outgrown its original small-park-newsletter roots into something CBS, the Washington Post, and Smithsonian all cover every October now.

Who’s Actually in the Bracket This Year

The full field isn’t public until the 18th, but two things about the 2026 season are already shaping who’s likely to be a contender.

Bear 32 “Chunk” is defending a title he almost didn’t get. He won 2025 with 96,350 votes — beating runner-up Bear 856 by more than 32,000 votes — after four straight years as a runner-up finally paying off. What made it notable wasn’t the margin. It’s that Chunk spent the entire 2025 salmon run with a freshly broken jaw, discovered by rangers back in June, and kept eating and packing on weight anyway. Park staff have said the injury never healed right and never will. He’s competing again in 2026 carrying the same permanent damage, which either makes him the sentimental favorite or the bear everyone assumes peaked last year — Fat Bear Week crowds tend to split on exactly that kind of story.

This has been an unusually eventful year at Brooks River. Rangers counted 25 spring cubs by early August, climbing past 30 once yearlings and 2½-year-olds were included — more bear families than the park has documented in recent memory, on the back of an exceptional 2025 salmon run. It hasn’t all been good news: the season also included a rare infanticide near the river in late July, a second cub death less than a week later, and — a genuine first for the park — a cross-generational adoption, where a 2½-year-old subadult took in an unrelated orphaned cub. None of that determines who wins the fat contest, but it’s the backdrop the 2026 bracket sits against, and it’s part of why this year’s cam footage has been more closely watched than usual.

How to Visit Katmai and Brooks Falls in Person

Watching from a couch is free. Standing on the platform above Brooks Falls is a different kind of trip entirely, and it’s worth being honest about what that actually requires before anyone starts pricing flights.

Katmai has no roads in from anywhere. There’s no gate, no entrance fee, and no $100 nonresident surcharge like the 11 parks that charge one — Katmai’s never had an entrance fee of any kind, for anyone. That’s not generosity, though. It’s because you can’t drive there at all. The only ways in are float plane or boat.

Getting to Brooks Camp:

• Fly to Anchorage, then transfer to a float plane, typically out of Lake Hood or from King Salmon (about 30 air miles from Brooks Camp).
• Single-day bear-viewing flights from Anchorage run $1,000-1,500 per person, all-in.
• A water taxi from King Salmon is the budget option, at roughly $550 round trip and about 45 minutes each way.
• No permit is required just to visit and view bears — that requirement only kicks in for camping or fishing, which run separate fees (camping permits are $18/person in peak season, plus a $6 reservation fee).
• Every visitor, permit or not, sits through a mandatory bear-safety orientation from an NPS ranger before heading to the viewing platforms. Not optional, and for good reason.

Timing matters more here than at most parks. Peak bear activity at the falls runs June through August, when the most animals show up and the fishing action is at its most dramatic. By the time Fat Bear Week itself rolls around in late September, the falls action has thinned out, but the bears are at their heaviest and most photogenic — which is sort of the point of the whole event. If seeing the salmon-catching spectacle in person is the goal, July beats September. If seeing genuinely enormous, winter-ready bears is the goal, September’s your window, cam footage or in-person.

Is Flying to Katmai Worth It, Just for Fat Bear Week?

Depends what you’re actually after. If the goal is specifically to watch the vote unfold and see the bears that inspired it, the cams do that better than a single day trip would — you get closer views, longer viewing time, and none of the $1,000+ price tag. A trip built around Fat Bear Week alone, with no other Alaska plans attached, is a lot of travel budget for something that’s genuinely free to watch from anywhere with WiFi.

Where it starts making sense: if a broader Alaska trip is already on the table — bundled with Denali or a longer bear-viewing itinerary — timing it around late July or August gets you the more active fishing spectacle, and a same-trip visit in September lines up with the bears at their fattest, if not the tournament dates themselves exactly. Brooks Camp lodging and flights book out well ahead of peak season, similar to the advance planning Yellowstone’s in-park lodges demand — this isn’t a trip you book the week before.

The Bottom Line

Fat Bear Week 2026 runs September 22-29, bracket revealed September 18, champion crowned on the 29th, and every bit of it is watchable for free through explore.org’s cams and voting widget. Chunk returns as defending champion with a jaw that never healed right, the cub population at Brooks River is bigger than it’s been in years, and none of that requires leaving your couch to follow. Getting to Brooks Falls in person is a real trip — four figures, a float plane, and a season that runs opposite the tournament’s own calendar — worth doing if Alaska’s already the plan, not worth building a whole trip around on its own.

Vote daily if you’re invested. The bears don’t know, but the salmon run they survived does the deciding either way.

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Fat Bear Week 2026 dates and voting details per the National Park Service and explore.org. 2025 champion and vote totals per The Washington Post and Smithsonian Magazine. 2026 Brooks River cub population and season details per Alaska’s News Source. Information current as of September 17, 2026 — confirm final bracket and any schedule changes at explore.org before voting.