Fat Bear Week 2024

Fat Bear Week is coming up. The info about it is scattered around a bit, so this will aggregate everything you need to know about the tournament!

If you've never heard of Fat Bear Week: Katmai National Park up in Alaska has a bunch of cameras set up to watch their Exceptionally Large Brown Bears. You can, for example, keep an eye on a waterfall where the bears'll frequently fish for salmon.

In 2014, somebody at the park had the idea to put photos of the bears at the start & end of the season on a site and let people vote for which one is fatter¹, in a single-elimination tournament. There's a pre-event these days too, Fat Bear Week Junior, for the cubs.

Important Dates

They Fat Bear Week site is still pending updates for 2024, so the information about this year's event -- the 10th anniversary -- is in a couple different spots. Here's the rundown:

Saturday, October 5th is usually a day where no voting takes place. The finals for Fat Bear Week always happen on Fat Bear Tuesday.

You can tune in to the bracket reveal livesteams if you want lots of pictures of bears and commentary by park rangers & bear experts.

Logistics

To participate in Fat Bear Week, you just gotta vote! Set up a reminder to stop in at FatBearWeek.org every morning during the voting periods. Voting typically happens from 11 AM - 7 PM US Central time. Here's a converter to turn that into your own timezone.

On the first day, there's usually some technical problems. You might need to visit an hour later on October 2nd. From there, it's been smooth sailing in past years -- except for the vote-stuffing scandal in 2022.

When you're voting, remember there are two matches every day. They're submitted independently, so it's easy to forget to make your picks for both.

Otis 😔

I'm not an avid bear-watcher⁵, but I did see some grim news: three-time Fat Bear Week champion 480 Otis is missing.

It's possible he's decided to stay in bed this summer. But he's an older bear, so perhaps three champion crowns is his limit. Wherever you are now, Otis, we salute you! 🫡

Fat Bear Madness

I've been putting together a Fat Bear Madness app. This won't be public -- I'm very afraid it would become much too popular -- but I'm happy to set up a division for anybody I know that wants to play. You can give your own friends an invite link and have your own little Fat Bear league.

It's a pretty threadbare-looking Laravel app. I've still got some polish to do for light mode / mobile (and to fix the leaderboard/scoreboard inconsistentcy), but it works!

• Fat Bear Madness at deercrime.org
• Source code

I'll be loading the brackets in as soon as they're available. That gives folks two days to make their selections.