The 28th Bear 100 starts at 6am on Friday 25 September from Hyrum Gibbons/Mount Logan Park in Logan, Utah, and runs point-to-point across the Bear River Range to finish at Fish Haven, Idaho, on the shore of Bear Lake. Three hundred runners will start. The race has a 36-hour cut-off, which is generous by the standards of a course with this much vertical gain and unforgiving by the standards of the terrain in its second half.
The numbers explain the reputation. The course climbs 20,321 feet between a low point of 4,853 feet and a high point of 8,865 feet, and roughly 65 per cent of it is single-track. That combination — sustained climbing at moderate altitude, on trail rather than road or jeep track — produces a race that rewards patience in the first 50 miles more reliably than it rewards early aggression. The Wasatch-Cache National Forest sections in the opening half are also where most of the day's heat is absorbed.
Demand has long outstripped the field size. For 2026, 886 entrants went into the lottery for 300 places, with a further 300 on the waiting list; a single ticket gave roughly a 28 per cent chance of selection and two tickets around 49 per cent. Those odds put the Bear in the same conversation as the better-known American hundreds without the media weight that attaches to Western States or Hardrock, and the race's status as a qualifier for both explains a good part of the pressure on entries.
That status matters for the make-up of the field. The Bear is a Hardrock and Western States qualifier and a UTMB Index race, which means a meaningful proportion of the 300 are running it as a means rather than an end — a finish inside the cut-off is the point, not a place. The front of the race is usually decided by a small group of regional runners rather than an internationally recruited elite, which has given the event a consistency of character that larger races have tended to lose.
Its position in the calendar is the other part of the appeal. Late September in northern Utah delivers the aspens and red maples that the race trades on in its own marketing, along with a temperature range that can run from the high twenties in the valleys on Friday afternoon to below freezing on the ridges overnight. It is one of the last significant American hundred-milers of the season, and the weather is the single largest variable between a fast year and a grinding one.