Meet This Year’s Chonky Champion of Fat Bear Week: Backpack, a Laid-Back 20-Year-Old Male Who’s a ‘Stoic Presence on the River’

The brown bear, who now weighs between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds after fattening up on salmon, earned his nickname as a cub. When he was little, he enjoyed riding on his mom’s back as she swam across a river

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

October 1, 2026 9:00 a.m.

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As a cub, Backpack liked to cling to his mother’s back as she swam across the Brooks River in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve. These days, Backpack is all grown up—and he’s considerably heavier. He’s so big, in fact, that he was crowned the champion of this year’s Fat Bear Week on September 29.

Backpack—a 20-year-old gentle giant known officially as 89—beat out an adult female named 910 to win the annual online tournament, which pits brown bears head-to-head in a single-elimination, bracket-style contest. In the end, Backpack won with 103,344 votes, compared to 910’s 98,253.

Backpack first came on the scene in 2006, when his mother Holly—who won Fat Bear Week in 2019—brought him to the Brooks River. As the duo swam across the waterway, the youngster had a habit of climbing on top of Holly, which is how he got his nickname.

In 2007, Backpack returned to the river as a yearling with a bad leg injury, which made park staffers concerned about his survival prospects. However, he pulled through and ultimately struck out on his own, separating from Holly in 2008.

Today, he’s a medium-large bear with blond ears who weighs between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds. His fur tends to be light brown early in the summer, transforming into a darker, grizzled brown hue by fall.

“He’s one of the bears that we’ve been able to watch on the live cams since the live cams were put in in 2012,” Sarah Bruce, a park ranger with Katmai, tells Alaska Public Media’s Ava White. “He’s a familiar bear. People have watched him his whole life.”

Backpack has relatively few visible wounds and scars for his size and age, which might reflect his unflappable demeanor.

“Unlike many large adult male bears, Backpack hasn’t shown much aggression toward his competitors,” according to his bio on Explore.org, the nonprofit media organization that helps host Fat Bear Week. “He’ll stand up for himself when necessary, but he prefers to use a quiet strength to gain access to preferred fishing spots. His body size suggests that the strategy works.”

Meet Bear 89 Backpack

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He’s known for perching on a rock in the middle of the river, downstream of the falls, where he patiently fishes for salmon.

“He’s more of a stoic presence on the river,” Bruce tells Alaska Public Media. “He doesn’t really get into drama or cause any upset in the hierarchy. He holds his own very quietly.”

Fat Bear Week, which started in 2014, celebrates the estimated 2,200 brown bears that live in Katmai National Park and Preserve, which spans more than four million acres on the Alaska Peninsula. The annual contest also serves as a fundraiser for the Katmai Conservancy, the park’s nonprofit partner.

After watching livestreams of the bears feeding at Brooks Falls and comparing before-and-after photos from the beginning and end of summer, fans vote for their favorite chunky bear. This year, for the first time, the contest included bear families. Organizers also added four additional bears to the bracket, expanding the initial field from 12 to 16.

Those efforts seem to have paid off: Fans cast more than 2.5 million votes throughout this year’s tournament, surpassing last year’s 1.7 million. The amount of traffic on the first day of voting also crashed the website, leading to jokes about how the bears broke the internet.

“I don’t think anybody would have thought that this would happen,” Bruce tells KTUU-TV’s Lars Hanson.

The bears start each summer on the scrawny side, but after taking advantage of the annual sockeye salmon run, they head into winter with generous fat stores. Each animal can eat dozens of the nutrient-rich fish per day—as much as 200,000 calories’ worth—and pack on hundreds of pounds between June and October.

The summer gorging season is important, as the bears can lose up to a third of their body weight during their long hibernations, which can last for five to eight months.

“Some animals store food as food, like squirrels and chipmunks and pikas,” Bruce McLellan, a wildlife ecologist who retired from the British Columbia Forest Service in Canada, told Outside magazine’s Gloria Dickie last year. “But others store it as fat. And that’s what bears are specialized to do. They’ve got to make hay when the sun shines. A bear can store a season of abundant food in fat.”

Though Backpack walks away with the official title, all this year’s competitors are winners in Bruce’s book.

“They have already won in the fact that they are set to survive another winter hibernation,” she tells Alaska Public Media. “They win all of the love.”

Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.