Tracking Gobi Grizzlies: Surviving Beyond the Back of Beyond

Few wildlife biologists can tell stories like Douglas Chadwick, a National Geographic contributor since 1977 who’s spent his life in the field with elusive and misunderstood animals—snow leopards in the Himalaya, wolverines and grizzly bears in North America. In this strange-but-true account he takes us into a mountainous corner of Mongolian desert, one of the world’s most difficult, remote landscapes, where only four to six inches of rain fall a year, most of the ground is stone, and temperatures range from 122 Fahrenheit to minus 40. How can anything live here? First confirmed by scientists as recently as the 1940s, the Gobi bear is the rarest of bears—a relative of grizzlies, shaggy-haired and shy yet playful, a tenacious champion of adaptation. With chapters like “Indiana Jones and the Gobi Death Worm” plus more than 150 images by photographer Joe Riis, it’s an exploration of survival and a reminder our world still holds mystery.