Fat Bear Week, Katmai National Park: How Voting Works & How to Win

1.2 million votes. Zero human nominees. That's the whole story.

1.2 million votes, from more than 100 countries, in a single week. That's what Fat Bear Week pulled in 2024, and nothing else on Alaska's public-vote ledger comes close. Not a statewide readers'-choice program. Not a hall-of-fame ballot. Not a weekly athlete poll. The largest confirmed public vote in the state belongs to a bracket of brown bears at Katmai National Park's Brooks River, and it has run every year since 2014.

Katmai National Park and Preserve, part of the National Park Service, organizes it jointly with the Katmai Conservancy and explore.org. explore.org does the heavy lifting on the tech side: it builds the bracket, runs the voting, and streams the live and archived webcams of Brooks River and Brooks Falls that voters actually watch before picking a side. Late September is when it happens. The field of bears gets revealed about a day before voting opens, then daily head-to-head matchups whittle it down until one bear is left standing at week's end. In 2025 that bear was number 32, nicknamed "Chunk."

Here's the part that changes how you think about the whole page: there's no person to promote. No athlete, no business, no candidate. The nominees are bears, identified by number and sometimes a nickname, filmed gaining weight for hibernation on the strength of that year's salmon run. A campaign here isn't about rallying support for someone, it's about a specific bear's footage being compelling enough, that week, to win a scroll-past vote. Browse the rest of our state-by-state contest directory and you won't find another wildlife bracket like it.

Same bear, new vote, every single day

Single elimination, bear versus bear. Lose a matchup and you're out, no wildcard round, no consolation bracket. The format is identical to any tournament bracket you've seen in sports, just with a Brooks River brown bear standing in for a seed.

No stat line, no season record. The only evidence on offer is that day's webcam footage of a bear looking convincingly enormous ahead of winter, and that's deliberate: it's what explore.org's cameras were built to show. Compare that to a conventional fan poll vote and one gap stands out immediately, Fat Bear Week has no account requirement at all, daily or otherwise, which is unusual even among free-to-vote platforms. That's a sharp contrast with a roster-based ballot like Alaska's player-of-the-year vote, where nominees are tracked by season stats rather than a single day's footage.

A week of daily elections, not one big push

Turnout that large rarely comes from one moment. Spread across 100-plus countries, the 2024 total reads like sustained attention returning day after day, not a single clip going viral once. Every matchup is its own fresh election. That's structurally different from a poll that stays open for a week and gets decided by whoever shows up last.

Chunk's 2025 title came out of that exact grind: seven-ish days, daily matchups, the field shrinking each time until one bear was left. And because it's always exactly two bears per matchup (not a crowded field like Best of Alaska's multi-nominee categories), every day's attention lands on a binary choice instead of getting split a dozen ways.

So if you're tracking a specific bear through the week: yesterday's margin buys you nothing today. A comfortable first-round win doesn't carry into round two, each day starts the vote count at zero again, and the live bracket page is the only place showing how the current matchup is trending before that window shuts. For the general mechanics of running a vote campaign on a bracket like this, see our guide to buying votes online, and for what "real" turnout actually measures at this scale, our real-votes breakdown covers it. Full package pricing for any of our vote services is on the pricing page.