Photographer Page

Barrett Hedges

Unlike the movie, the real-life cocaine bear didn't go on a coke-fueled rampage, but it did consume a fatal amount of cocaine left in the woods by smugglers. Here, an American black bear, Ursus americanus, eats dandelions.

A mother grizzly keeps watch at Lake Clark National Park in Alaska. The predator is locally extinct in California, part of its former range.

Hunters sometimes target the biggest bears, which may be the ones that can swim farther, hunt better, and go longer without food as environmental changes put pressure on them.

Even in summer, temperatures reach just above freezing at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, the northernmost community on the North American continent. Few tourists reach America’s largest tundra wilderness area, now shrunk by development of the massive Prudhoe Bay Oil Field.

Black bears are not known for being aggressive, but attacks on people occasionally occur.

A young gray wolf stalks through the snow. Wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s.