Most bears at Anan Creek grab a salmon and haul it to the bank. One unnamed black bear in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest skipped the walk entirely: it parked itself directly beneath a waterfall and ate its catch while the creek poured over its head.
That move has now earned the animal the 2026 Shower Beer award, handed out by the US Forest Service staff who watch the bears at the Anan Wildlife Observatory each summer. The bear has no name, but it does have a title.
“After watching this relaxed black bear gnawing on a salmon under rushing waters, we’re wondering if it might catch on—like the ursine equivalent of the shower beer,” the Tongass team wrote. “The more you watch, the more sense it makes. No mess and no need to move to start fishing again. This bear may be on to something.”
Why a waterfall dinner is not as silly as it looks
The rangers’ joke has a practical core, and they spelled it out themselves: no mess, and no need to move before fishing again. A bear that eats in the spot where it fishes skips the trip to the bank and back, and at a creek packed with salmon the next meal is never far from the last one.
Anan Creek carries one of the biggest runs of pink salmon in Southeast Alaska. According to the group Friends of Anan, 39 known bears fed there this year: 31 black bears (Ursus americanus) and eight brown bears (Ursus arctos). That works out to roughly four black bears for every brown bear, about 79 percent of the known animals. At Katmai, by contrast, the famous contest is all brown bears.
The Anan Bear Awards, from a whiteboard to a yearly tradition
The series dates to October 3, 2022, when a bear the staff called “Unnamed Thick One” took Fattest Bear, and nine titles went out that first autumn. Scuba Sue, famous for plunging her entire head under the current to hunt, collected Best Fisher-bear.
The idea came from the people who live closest to the bears. The observatory sits on the mainland roughly 30 miles southeast of Wrangell, and its seasonal Forest Service crew bunks on a floathouse moored in Anan Bay. Identifying individual animals, which feeds the agency’s population counts, is part of their job, and a whiteboard of joke categories in the floathouse breezeway grew out of all that watching, according to Wrangell recreation planner Dee Galla. Paul Robbins, the forest’s public affairs officer, turned the crew’s photos and notes into posts.
The 2026 run so far:
- Dude abides Award: Paul, a black bear marked by two thin lines on his chest and a scar on his left ear, for letting rivals steal his fish rather than fighting. “Paul chose kindness over combat when his fish were stolen,” the team wrote. He was named pickiest bear in 2024.
- Shower Beer award: the unnamed waterfall diner.
- Other 2026 honorees: an Introvert Award for a male black bear called Nugget, a Helicopter Mom Award for a watchful mother named Gemini, and a Mama Bear award for a black bear with a mullet.
How Anan’s awards differ from Fat Bear Week
The obvious comparison is Fat Bear Week at Katmai National Park and Preserve in southwestern Alaska, where the public votes in a knockout bracket for the brown bear that packed on the most weight. The 2026 contest ran September 22 to 29 and was won by Bear 89, known as Backpack. Katmai is home to about 2,200 brown bears, and the event drew 1.7 million participants in 2025.
Anan works differently. Nobody votes; staff pick the winners. And the categories reward behavior rather than bulk. “We prefer to highlight their unique personalities and traits over their girth,” Robbins said when the awards launched. “Katmai has that well done, so we’ll leave that to them and focus on the antics of Anan bears.”
The setting helps. The Tongass is the largest national forest in the United States at 16.7 million acres, a temperate rainforest where brown and black bears, bald eagles and five species of salmon are common. Anan is one of its most remote corners, which is part of why Robbins pitched the awards as a way to show the bears to people who will never make the trip.
Seeing it for yourself
A public live camera trained on the creek’s lower falls streams the bears during the season, and the Tongass forest posts each new award on its social media pages. If you plan to go in person, the window is set by the fish: salmon start pushing up Anan Creek in early July, and the bears arrive right behind them.
Further reading
Image: Forest Service Alaska Region, USDA, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
