A look at how Fat Bear Week went from a one-off event to the highlight of every year
A history of the annual celebration of hefty Alaskan bears
Fat Bear Week, the seven days of the year when humanity comes together to celebrate just how much weight a bunch of Alaskan bears have packed on over previous months, is the finest holiday we have. Forget Halloween. Forget Thanksgiving. Only Fat Bear Week offers an opportunity for us to combine gambling, conservation, and staring at portly apex predators into a single event.
But it wasn’t always this way. Like a plucky little cub eating truckloads of salmon until it grows into a lumbering furry murder-blimp, Fat Bear Week needed time to develop fully into the impressive specimen it is now. In a new article, Mental Floss traced the evolution of the event from 2014's Fat Bear Tuesday to the weeklong festivities of the annual Weeks we have today.
The event’s founder (and Explore.org naturalist) Mike Fitz said that he’s long known “that bears were very charismatic creatures” and Fat Bear Week—inspired by a viewer comment about a bear’s seasonal growth—was meant to show that off to the rest of the world “in a fun way.” The 2014 Fat Bear Tuesday, like the modern version, helped promote Explore’s livestreams that show the bears of Katmai National Park And Reserve, Alaska as they hang out and hunt at Brooks Falls. Over time, the one-day event expanded into its current form, each year attracting more and more viewers as the gospel of chunky ursine tournaments spreads.