Marty Zajanc spent his formative years exploring the rivers and forests around Oakridge, Oregon.  The call of the wild never left him.  After attending colleges in Oregon and California he moved to Bigfork, Montana, his home base for worldwide travels over the next 35 years.  As a horticulturist and wilderness guide he was able to adhere to his simple lifestyle while pursuing more far reaching passions.  Surfing and fly-fishing took him to the remote atolls and islands of the South Pacific, while Tasmania and New Zealand offered an extensive ‘backyard’ for his mountainous explorations.

 

 

No place, however, captured his attentions more than the vast wild lands of Alaska.  After many tentative explorations during his youth, he stumbled into the outlandishly wild and tenacious lands of the Aleutian Peninsula.  Here was the perfect landscape to pursue his philosophical and psychological interests.  At the age of 44, he began a brazen journey that seemingly had no end.  Nine different journeys over a 10-year period wove a serpentine path of exploration that took him up the Aleutian Mountains, around and through the mighty Alaska Range, and a thousand miles to the graceful backside of Denali.  After struggling through the warmer interior, then skiing across the frozen Yukon River and on to the fringes of the Arctic, he at last felt he had earned his right of passage and could enter the Brooks Range and go beyond to the barren flatness of the North Slope.