Olivia Branchaud was writing an essay at her college in Rome, Italy, when she got the notification. “Time to Be Real," the alert said. She had two minutes to snap a dual-camera photo, front and back simultaneously, to share with her friends on the social app.
“I was feeling kind of homesick. I was looking at the Fat Bear Week live cam, and the notification went off. I was like, ‘I need to show my friends on BeReal the fat bears,’” Branchaud said.
It resulted in a selfie and a photo of a burly brown bear in the water. She wrote: “LOOK AT HOW FAT THE BEARS ARE IM SO HOMESICKKKKK.”
Branchaud is one of over a million people from around the globe who tune into Alaska’s wildly-popular Fat Bear Week every fall – celebrating how chubby the bears have gotten in preparation for months of hibernation. Twelve bears entered this year’s bracket, and voters will determine which is the fattest of them all.
But Branchaud, who’s originally from Anchorage, won’t be voting because she simply can’t pick a favorite.
“I don't have a bracket, because I feel like it's a disservice to the fatness of the other bear. So I never vote,” she said. “I am just happy that the bears are being fed.”
Katmai bears feast on the world’s largest sockeye salmon run, and it’s how they pack on hundreds of pounds each summer. As an Alaskan, Branchaud said the competition gives her a sense of pride.
“I feel like it unites us as a state, gives us something to rally behind,” she said.
It's not just people from Alaska who have their eyes glued to the bears.
Robin Keegan is an elementary school reading specialist in Richmond, Va., who has followed Fat Bear Week for about five years. Her school is celebrating in a few weeks, and they’ll go all out with students measuring themselves beside a life-size brown bear cutout, and playing cornhole with stuffed salmon instead of bean bags.
“Every day, I announce over the intercom who won the fat bear thing, and you can hear them all cheering when the bears win,” she said. “The teachers run the explore.org website in the morning and in the evening before they go home, so they can see them.”
Keegan even started a Facebook group called “Fat Bear Week for Educators” as a hub for teachers to share educational activities and resources centered around the competition. The group has over 900 members who exchange creative ways to bring bears into the classroom.
Keegan said students at her school love it. The competition is also an opportunity for the kids to learn about the differences between their state’s smaller black bears and Katmai’s massive brown bears, and it helps students connect to the larger world around them.
“I work in a population where our students have limited access to those outdoor spaces, and for them to imagine that there's these spaces that are open, where things are allowed to be wild, is fascinating to watch them realize that – that they exist, not in a zoo, but in this space,” Keegan said.
Keegan is a finalist for a grant for teachers to learn and travel. She wrote her proposal to visit Katmai, which is on her bucket list.
It’s also on the bucket list of Geoff Hartley, who works at a church in northwestern Arkansas.
Hartley came across Fat Bear Week on social media almost 10 years ago and has been a devoted follower ever since.
“Bears, especially the brown bears up there, are just awesome to me. That hit my algorithm, and I just started joining every fat bear group that I could find on Facebook,” he said while wearing a Fat Bear Week hat and T-shirt. He said he has a couple more in his closet.
Hartley introduced Fat Bear Week to his friend, Landin Norman, who said the competition is one of his favorite things.
“It's Jesus, my family, then fat bears,” said Norman, who’s a priest at another church in Arkansas.
Hartley also has introduced Fat Bear Week to his entire congregation. Each year, he passes out copies of the bracket for them to fill out. Whoever has the most accurate bracket wins a bear-themed prize – once it was a gift card to a local restaurant called the “Black Bear Diner.”
Hartley said he’s rooting for 32 Chunk – one of the largest bears at Brooks River weighing in at more than 1,200 pounds. The park describes Chunk as a determined and adaptable bear. He was also last year’s runner up, but Hartley thinks this could be his year.
“The real edge that he has is now he's got the story,” Hartley said. “He came to the falls with a broken jaw, and beat the odds and and still wound up being not just, you know, fattening up enough to hibernate, but being one of the dominant bores and fattest bears there.”
There are still a few days left in the competition and there can only be one weighty winner, so make sure you vote online at explore.org before polls close on Tuesday at 5 p.m. Alaska time.
