Chunk came back to Brooks Falls this September with his lower jaw still hanging off the right side of his muzzle, a year after the injury he carried to the 2025 Fat Bear Week title. On September 24, in his first matchup of Fat Bear Week 2026, voters picked bear 164, Bucky, over the defending champion by 118,731 votes to 46,053.
Five days later the title went to bear 89, known as Backpack, who beat bear 910 in the final by 103,334 votes to 98,253, according to the official results posted by explore.org. The tournament, run by Katmai National Park and Preserve, explore.org and the Katmai Conservancy, drew 2,503,731 votes in all.
Both bears carry a history of injury that once made people wonder whether they would last. One was hurt as a full-grown male, the other as a cub barely a year old.
A jaw that healed crooked
Chunk, officially bear 32, was first identified at Brooks River as a young independent bear in 2007. The National Park Service profile of bear 32, last updated on September 21, 2026, describes the damage plainly.
“In early summer 2025, 32 returned to the Brooks River with a broken jaw. Park staff are unsure how this happened, but was likely due to a fight with another male bear. This break is permanent and has fully healed. His jaw is still attached to the rest of the mandible but hangs off the right side of his muzzle,” the agency writes. The mandible is the lower jawbone, the part a bear uses to grip and tear a salmon.
Explore.org’s video profile of Chunk goes further on the likely cause. “No person observed how Chunk was injured, but the nature of the fracture strongly suggests that he broke his jaw in a fight with another bear. The timing, during the peak of the brown bear mating season, presents the possibility that it happened in combat over a fleeting mating opportunity,” the narrator says.
How an injured bear kept eating
A broken jaw could easily have finished a wild bear, since a Katmai brown bear has roughly six months to eat a year’s worth of food. Explore.org credits a mix of size, timing and behavior for his recovery.
“His body size alone ensured a high rank in the hierarchy and good access to productive fishing spots. The 2025 salmon run was exceptionally abundant in Brooks River, too, giving him ample opportunity to satisfy his hunger with ease. Most importantly, Chunk knew his strengths and recognized his weaknesses. We watched him adapt and recover in real time,” the video says.
Voters agreed that year. Chunk had finished second in 2023 and 2024, and in 2025 he took his first title with 96,350 votes in the final, about 30,000 more than bear 856, in a contest that drew more than 1.7 million votes.
A summer nobody could follow
“His story this summer is mostly unknown. Chunk made few appearances at Brooks River before September. His low hanging belly is evidence that he was eating well, but we don’t know where he made his living before his recent return,” his 2026 contest biography on explore.org reads.
Backpack’s long road to the crown
The winner has his own story of survival, and Fitz tells it in explore.org’s video introduction to bear 89. “Backpack’s mother, the legendary Holly, introduced him to Brooks River when he was a first-year cub in 2006. Backpack often climbed onto his mother’s back when the pair swam in the river, a habit that inspired his nickname,” Fitz says.
“He returned with his mom the following summer with a significant leg injury. No person witnessed how Backpack was injured, although he clearly favored the injured leg and did not put weight on it for much of the summer. Park staff, along with the visiting public, openly wondered about his chances of survival,” he continues.
The park did not step in. “Sometimes people demanded that rangers intervene on his behalf, but intervention might have meant the permanent separation of the family and removed him from the wild. Bears, even cubs, are extraordinarily resilient in the face of pain and injury,” Fitz says. Backpack’s leg healed, and he left his mother in 2008.
Holly herself won Fat Bear Week in 2019, so the 2026 title kept the crown in the family. Backpack is now 20.
A bracket full of cubs
This year’s bracket grew from 12 bears to 16 and, for the first time, included five whole families. Explore.org says Brooks River had a record 19 bear families and 37 cubs in summer 2026.
“There are more cubs at Brooks Camp this year than have been seen in a long time,” park superintendent Mark Sturm said in the park’s September 11 announcement. “A new generation of fat bears is taking shape, and they’re off to a strong start. We’re excited to watch them grow and learn as they prepare for winter in Katmai’s incredible ecosystem.”
Bear 132 and her three spring cubs reached the semifinals before losing to 910.
Why the fat matters in winter
Behind the jokes, the contest is about survival. In the Katmai region most bears enter their dens in October and November, and the park service says they come out in spring having lost up to 33 percent of their body weight during a hibernation that runs entirely on stored fat.
That is why the summer at Brooks Falls looks so frantic. On days when many salmon are running, a large and dominant male will sometimes catch and eat more than 30 fish, according to the park, and the salmon that bears carry away from Alaska’s streams also feed the forest.
Salmon is not the whole menu, though. Explore.org notes that brown bears are omnivores that eat dozens of plant and animal foods in Katmai, and grizzlies elsewhere fatten up on foods as unexpected as moths.
What the votes cannot tell us
Nobody puts these bears on a scale, and explore.org itself calls Fat Bear Week “a subjective competition,” noting that success for Katmai’s bears “is measured in many ways.”
Much of what is known also depends on where the cameras point. No one saw Chunk’s jaw break or Backpack’s leg injury, and Chunk’s whereabouts for most of 2026 remain a blank.
The cameras also show the hard parts. On July 28, mother bear 806 killed and partly ate bear 909’s spring cub, and her contest biography warns against reading it as a morality tale. “806 is neither villain nor hero. She’s a bear, one who is fully capable of expressing great ferocity at the same time she is devoted and caring,” it says.
There is no scientific study behind this story. The official Fat Bear Week 2026 results were published by explore.org after the final on September 29, 2026, and the bear profiles come from Katmai National Park and Preserve and explore.org.
The bearcams keep running into the fall, and the park service lists early September through mid-October as one of the busiest stretches for bears along Brooks River. For Chunk and Backpack, the next few weeks of fishing matter more than any vote.
Photo: NPS / C. Loberg
