The Great Bear Lake is the largest lake entirely in Canada and the fourth largest lake in North America. It measures about 12,275 square miles (31,800 square km), and is located on the Arctic Circle in the Northwest Territories. It is ice-bound eight months of the year.

It got its name because there are an awful lot of bears there, mostly grizzly and black bears.

Radium and Uranium were discovered there in the 1940s, and the mining of them in the secret Eldorado mine killed many of the Sahtu Dene ("Bear-Water people"), one of the aboriginal groups that lives around the lake.