How fat are the bears of fat bear week?
Writing and research by Alyssa Fowers; illustrations by Emily Eng, Hannah Dormido, and Alyssa Fowers
I began watching Katmai National Park’s bear cameras in 2020 and became a passionate campaigner for Fat Bear Week, when the public votes on which bear had the greatest success at becoming fat over the course of the summer and fall.
I immediately began begging my editors to let me do a story on fat bear week. They finally said yes in 2022. By then, Fat Bear Week was already being covered by the Style section, so we needed a unique angle. Since story editor Emily Eng is also an accomplished nature illustrator, I suggested that we show exactly how fat the bears were in comparison to familiar objects like plane seats, king-sized mattresses, and human reporters:
Emily created the plane seat and mattress illustrations, while I did the comparison to a human reporter.
To figure out the dimensions of the Katmai bears, we used National Park GIS specialist Joel Cusick’s scans of the bears, taken while they stood still at Brooks Falls waiting for salmon to swim by.
Conflict of interest notice: I am a passionate partisan for bear #128 Grazer, who won Fat Bear Week in 2023.
