Backpack Wins Fat Bear Week 2026, Defeating 910 in Record-Breaking Online Contest

Key facts

• Backpack, a 20-year-old male brown bear known as 89, won Fat Bear Week on September 29, 2026, with 103,344 votes, defeating 910, who received 98,253 votes.
• The 2026 contest drew over 2.5 million votes, up from 1.7 million in the previous year, and crashed the website on the first day of voting.
• The bracket expanded from 12 to 16 bears and included bear families for the first time.
• Backpack first appeared at Brooks River in 2006 with his mother Holly, the 2019 Fat Bear Week champion, and survived a leg injury in 2007 before separating from Holly in 2008.
• Backpack weighs between 1,000 and 1,200 pounds, has blond ears, and is described by park ranger Sarah Bruce as a 'stoic presence on the river.'
• Runner-up 910 is the offspring of 409 Beadnose, the 2018 Fat Bear Week champion.
• Fat Bear Week began in 2014 to celebrate the estimated 2,200 brown bears in Katmai National Park and Preserve, a four-million-acre area on the Alaska Peninsula, and serves as a fundraiser for the Katmai Conservancy.
• During summer, bears eat up to 200,000 calories a day from sockeye salmon, gaining hundreds of pounds to prepare for hibernation, which can last five to eight months and result in up to a third of body weight loss.