An Alaska national park’s yearly celebration of the beefy, brown and bristly is getting underway as some of the chunkiest bears on the planet fatten up for their long winter slumber.
Fat Bear Week doesn’t officially start at Katmai National Park and Preserve until Oct. 2, when fans can begin voting online for their favorite ursine behemoths in tournament-style brackets.
But on Tuesday organizers revealed the four cub contestants in this week’s Fat Bear Jr. contest – with the “chubby champ charging on to face the corpulent competition” in the adult bracket, as Naomi Boak of the nonprofit Katmai Conservancy put it during the livestreamed announcement.
The annual contest, which drew more than 1.3 million votes last year, is way to celebrate the resiliency of the 2,200 brown bears that live in the preserve on the Alaska Peninsula, which extends from the state’s southwest corner toward the Aleutian Islands. The …