Lecture by Arctic explorer set Dec. 4

Marty Zajanc spent ten years exploring all of Alaska.

Mountain Home Arts Council will present a slide show presentation and lecture by Marty Zajanc. an Alaskan explorer, at Mountain Home Junior High School, Dec. 4, beginning at 7 p.m. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Zajanc began with nothing in Alaska but the desire to follow beauty, detour for adventure, and search for the hidden path of knowledge, a spokesperson for the council said. Ten years later, after nine different treks and seven months of travel, he walked into Barrow, completing a 3,000-mile serpentine journey across one of the last great wilderness areas on the planet.

Zajanc spent the formative years of his childhood exploring the rivers and forests around Oakridge, Ore. The call of the wild never left him. After attending colleges in Oregon and California he moved to Bigfork, Mont, his home base for worldwide travels over the next 35 years.

As a horticulturist and wilderness guide he was able to adhere to a simple lifestyle while pursuing other 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. He was captivated. Here was the perfect landscape to pursue his philosophical and psychological interests."

At the age of 44 he began his Alaskan journey with no food or rescue devices. 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 backside of Denali.

After struggling through the warmer interior, and 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," the spokesperson said.

The Dec. 4 presentation guides attendees through the first two tumultuous treks along the Aleutian Range, skips quickly through the interior, then romps into the Arctic for the last thousand miles to capture the feel of a the frozen land, "and the emotions of a man nearing the end of a quest."