He’s back. Just in case you haven’t been paying attention, 480 Otis, the winningest bear in the annual competition at Alaska’s Katmai National Park, is in the running to become the champion once again this week. Otis once ate 42 salmon in one sitting. He has a particular technique that makes him successful when it comes to fishing. He sits in the middle of the river and waits for the fish to come to him. According to rangers at the park he is one of the most patient bears they have ever seen. There are a lot of bears who simply can’t compete with him. However, at least to a casual observer, Otis isn’t the fattest bear in the park. Bear 747, winner in 2020, is one of the largest bears on the planet. It is estimated that his weight could top 1400 pounds this year.

We won’t know the winner until next week. Voting is open until Tuesday, October 11, when the winner will be declared. You don’t have to go to Alaska to participate in the election. There is a livestream that you can watch by clicking on this link. The camera is trained on Brooks Falls, where the bears go to eat migrating salmon in preparation for winter hibernation. People tune in from around the world, get to know the bears, and cast their votes.

I haven’t made it up to Alaska to view the bears in person. May be “in person” is the wrong term for bears. At any rate, the livestream almost perpetually shows more grizzlies in one place than I have ever seen in my travels. I like to watch bears from a safe distance, so the livestream is fun for me. More than trying to figure out which of the big male bears is largest, or which has the best fishing technique, I enjoy watching mother bears with cubs who are just learning to hunt. The cubs are probably facing their first winter as independent hibernators. Cubs are born in the winter during hibernation, but after their first summer out of the den, they no longer are able to nurse and gain nutrition from their mothers. Like adult bears, they have to eat enough food to sustain their bodies through five to six months of hibernation.

Fat Bear Week isn’t the top news story on most web sites, but this year, in addition to coverage by the BBC, the Washington Post also had a story about the bears on its web site home page. The big bears are, at least to some, big news.

The first week of October marks an anniversary that I share with a lot of other people who happened to be in Rapid City, South Dakota during the first week of October, 2013. It was my first experience with a winter storm that had an official name. Winter Storm Atlas was an early blizzard that raged for three days, dumping about 30 inches of snow in our neighborhood and packing winds above 40 mph. We lost three large pine trees in our back yard, and we were lucky because all of them fell away from the house and deck. We were snowed in without power to our home for three days. We didn’t suffer much. Our home was secure and warm and we had a huge snow bank outside of our basement door that made a good backup freezer when we moved some of our perishable food from the refrigerator to the freezer.

Once the blizzards close the roads there is time to talk to neighbors. And there was plenty of shoveling once it quit snowing. I made the mistake of waiting too long before heading home and couldn’t make it up the last hill to our house even though I was driving an all wheel drive car. The car spent the blizzard in a neighbor’s driveway and in exchange, I shoveled not only our driveway but also the driveway of the neighbor. “Shoveled” is a euphemism. I had a snow blower during the winters we lived in Rapid City. I also had quite a bit of chainsaw work, limbing and cutting the downed threes into chunks to be split later.

Once the plows had come, I hauled a truck and trailer load of limbs to a huge parking lot near the ball stadium which was already piled high with branches from trees in the area. The image of all of the trees in that parking lot is as striking in my memory as were the images of cars stranded in parking lots by the blizzard.

Cattle ranchers across western South Dakota suffered huge losses as fences were buried and drifts made it impossible for them to get feed to their animals.

It was an impressive storm, and it gave me a story to tell my grandchildren. I remember my father and grandfather entertaining us with stories of huge blizzards that raged across North Dakota when my dad was a boy. It seems fitting that I have a blizzard story to tell to my grandchildren.

During the time we lived in Rapid City, fall blizzards were not usually severe. The big storms came in the spring. The previous April, we had a storm with more than 20 inches of wet, heavy snow. One year there was a blizzard during Holy Week and I had to use my pickup to drag downed trees across the church parking lot to clear the entrance of the church for Easter services. We also tell the story of the Mother’s Day Blizzard that dumped heavy snow on May 11, which is pretty late for snowfall even in Rapid City.

I don’t have any snow to shovel this October. In fact, during our first winter in this house I observed that most of my neighbors don’t even own snow shovels. I’m the only one who gets out and shovels the driveway and walk, a task that you need to do early in the day because most of the time the snow has all melted by noon.

Fat bears, big storms - both leave us with stories to tell.