Alaska’s Fat Bear Week has crowned a new champion – and this time, it wasn’t even close.
Meet Chunk, a 1,200-pound behemoth with a broken jaw who just dominated the field after three years of coming up short.
And this brown bear nicknamed Bear 32 just proved that sometimes the fourth time really is the charm in Alaska’s wildly popular online contest.
Chunk dominates Fat Bear Week despite broken jaw
Chunk didn’t just win Fat Bear Week on Tuesday – he crushed his opponents in the tournament that had over 1.5 million people glued to their screens.
The annual contest at Alaska’s Katmai National Park lets fans watch 12 bears gorge themselves on salmon through live webcams, then vote for their favorites as competitors face off one-on-one until only one champion remains.
But here’s what makes Chunk’s victory even more impressive.
"Despite his broken jaw, he remains one of the biggest, baddest bears at Brooks River," said Mike Fitz, a naturalist for explore.org.¹
Fitz believes Chunk hurt his jaw fighting another bear – which apparently didn’t slow him down one bit.
The massive brown bear, designated as Bear 32 by park officials, defeated Bear 856 in the championship round after falling just short of victory three times before.
Contest organizers estimate Chunk weighs around 1,200 pounds, though they can’t weigh the bears directly for obvious safety reasons.
Instead, they’ve used laser technology called LIDAR to scan the bears’ density and calculate weight estimates.
Record salmon run creates bear bonanza at Brooks River
The bears had something special working in their favor this year – the biggest salmon run anyone can remember.
Katmai National Park ranger Sarah Bruce estimated around 200,000 salmon made their way up Brooks River, about 300 miles from Anchorage.²
According to Katmai Conservancy spokesperson Naomi Boak, this was the largest abundance of salmon in the living memories of the bears or the humans who have been running the Fat Bear Week contest since 2014.³
This salmon abundance changed everything about how the bears behaved.
In normal years, the toughest bears fight over the best fishing spots at Brooks Falls, where salmon bottleneck and leap from the water.
This year? Brooks Falls fishing spots were often empty as bears spread out to hunt up and down the entire river.
The abundance "decreased conflict in the river since salmon were readily available," Boak explained.⁴
Things were so peaceful that humans could fish alongside the bears – Monday’s live cameras showed two people calmly casting fishing rods while brown bears plodded past them upstream and downstream.
The dark side of bear competition caught on camera
Not everything was peaceful in bear country this year.
The live cameras captured a heartbreaking moment in 2024 when mother bear 128 Grazer’s cub slipped over the waterfall and floated into Chunk’s fishing spot.
Chunk attacked and injured the cub, leading to a fierce battle with Grazer.
The cub ultimately died from its injuries.
After that dramatic fight, voting fans gave Grazer a victory over Chunk in last year’s competition – making this year’s win even sweeter for the giant bear.
Fat Bear Week started in 2014 as an interactive way to educate the public about brown bears, which are closely related to their inland relatives, the grizzlies.
These bears spend their summers catching and eating as many salmon as possible to build up fat reserves for their winter hibernation in Alaska’s harsh conditions.
Voters can review before and after photos showing the bears skinny when summer begins and magnificently rotund by season’s end.
Some fans choose their favorites based on size, others on appearance or the bear’s personal story.
For Chunk, after three years of being the runner-up, he’s finally taken the crown – broken jaw and all.
The 1,200-pound champion proved that sometimes persistence pays off, even in the wild world of competitive bear watching.
—
¹ Mike Fitz, naturalist for explore.org, quoted in The Horn editorial team report, October 1, 2025.
² Sarah Bruce, Katmai National Park ranger, announcement referenced in The Horn editorial team report, October 1, 2025.
³ Naomi Boak, Katmai Conservancy spokesperson, The Horn editorial team report, October 1, 2025.
⁴ Naomi Boak, Katmai Conservancy spokesperson, email quoted in The Horn editorial team report, October 1, 2025.
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