A pumpkin named Rocky has delivered a suitably heavyweight comeback. The giant gourd won California’s Half Moon Bay weigh-off on 12 October 2026 at 2,389 pounds, securing Minnesota grower Travis Gienger his fifth victory in the competition.
The organisers’ official results list Gienger, from Anoka, as the winner of $21,501. First place is paid at $9 per pound: for once, the amount of pumpkin really does translate directly into the size of the cheque. Rocky weighed 116 pounds more than the second-place entry.
At about 1.08 metric tonnes, this is a pumpkin that makes the ordinary doorstep variety look rather modest. The event photographs show its pale, deeply ridged bulk occupying a stage, with people beside it providing the most useful measuring scale of all.
A growing-season comeback
There was a less happy ending last year. Associated Press reporting before the contest explained that Gienger missed the 2025 event because his pumpkin broke while it was growing. This year, Rocky made it through to the scales and the top of the results table.
Gienger’s previous Half Moon Bay victories came in 2020, 2022, 2023 and 2024, according to the event’s champions list. The sequence gives this year’s result some satisfying context: a return to winning after a season when he could not enter.
The scales decide
The contest has been running since 1974, when Half Moon Bay and Circleville, Ohio, began a friendly pumpkin rivalry. It has become a place where a growing season’s work is reduced to one very public number.
Getting there involves more than growing something enormous. The official rules require entries to be healthy and undamaged, without holes or cracks extending into the fruit’s interior. Pumpkins are weighed without carrying devices.
Rocky’s victory did not set a new world record. It did produce a California contest win, a fifth title and a substantial payday. For anyone following the story as a guessing game, the answer is now official: 2,389 pounds of comeback.
Further coverage: FOX 9.
