AILSA CHANG, HOST:
It is Fat Bear Week at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska. Every fall, the online competition celebrates how fat the bears have gotten in preparation for months of hibernation. As Alaska Public Media's Ava White reports, people are tuning in from way beyond Alaska to see who will be crowned the chubby champ.
AVA WHITE, BYLINE: Last year, over a million people voted for their favorite fat bear, according to the National Park Service. One of them is Robin Keegan, an elementary schoolteacher in Richmond, Virginia. Every year, her school pulls up the livestreams of the bears fishing, fighting and sleeping in the national park for the students to watch.
ROBIN KEEGAN: It is people's escapism. I think it heals our hearts in lots of ways to have this thing that's far away from all of us that we're all bonding over and all rooting for.
WHITE: The school pulls out all the stops with bear-themed games and activities, like letting students measure themselves beside a life-size brown bear cutout. Keegan says that a lot of her students don't have much access to wilderness.
KEEGAN: For them to, like, imagine that there's these spaces that are open, where things are allowed to be wild, is fascinating to watch them realize that.
GEOFF HARTLEY: Bears, especially the brown bears up there, are just awesome.
WHITE: Geoff Hartley works at a church in northwestern Arkansas and was wearing a T-shirt saying, I'm ready for Fat Bear Week when we spoke on Zoom. Each year, he prints the 12-bear bracket and passes them out to his congregation to fill out. Whoever has the most accurate bracket wins a bear-themed prize. He says he loves that it brings people together.
HARTLEY: It's a community. It's a place to get together with people all over the world of different backgrounds. But, you know, we all love fat bears. We all love rooting for the bears, cheering them on.
WHITE: Hartley cheers for the same bear each year - No. 32, or Chunk. Chunk is one of the largest bears at the Brooks River, weighing in at a whopping 1,200 pounds-plus, and was last year's runner up. Olivia Branchaud, meanwhile, says picking a favorite is too hard.
OLIVIA BRANCHAUD: I don't have a bracket because I feel like it's a disservice to the fatness of the other bears (laughter). So I never vote. I am just happy that the bears are being fed.
WHITE: The Alaskan now lives in Rome, Italy, and says watching the competition is a way to connect with home. Fat Bear Week ends Tuesday. You can vote online at explore.org. For NPR News, I'm Ava White in Anchorage.
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