You could fit four Montanas into Alaska. To walk across Alaska would be like crossing the United States on foot, with one significant exception: There are no highways to take you from one end of Alaska to the other.
No trails, either. And, let's be honest. This is no North Dakota topography you'd be tackling. Swamps, bogs, dense brush, icefields, forests, mountain ranges, extreme weather and detours around the nearly 2 million lakes in Alaska would await anyone attempting such a journey.
Up to then, the Polson adventurer was simply exploring different areas of Alaska, putting himself to the test each time. He took no food, no phone, no GPS, no rescue locator devices. Just a fishing pole and lures, a small inflatable raft, a .22-caliber rifle and bullets, a camera, compass, journal, sleeping bag and tent, a pot, bowl, some clothes and a map of Alaska he'd torn out of an atlas.
Over the years, he encountered hundreds of bears, thousands of caribou, millions of salmon, billions of mosquitoes and - outside of a rare and remote Native village he might stumble upon - a grand total of approximately 30 human beings, mostly hunters.
He also lost (and regained when he would return home to Montana) a total of 160 pounds, at the rate of 15 to 30 pounds per journey.
His trip began in 1996 when he was 43 and ended in 2006 when he was 53.
But its genesis came at the end of a 23-day exploration of the Alaskan Peninsula with a former girlfriend in 1995.
"It was the last day, and I walked about a mile out into the tundra looking for caribou or moose horns to take home as a souvenir," says Zajanc, whose last name rhymes with "science."
"The ground was soft and spongy, a lot of lichen and moss," he goes on. "Every footstep you'd sink 4 to 6 inches in, and in some places you might sink a foot. I was making my way across this when all of a sudden, a brown bear appeared out of a gully."
Upon spying Zajanc, the bear crouched down, pinned its ears back and began creeping toward the human.
"He was sneaking up on me like a lion," Zajanc says.
Zajanc didn't move, but he shouted.
"What are you doing, bear?" he yelled. "Get out of here!"
The lion turned lamb.
"He got this guilty look on his face," Zajanc says. "I'll never forget that look. And then he backed up and walked away."
Zajanc turned. On a nearby pond, two tundra swans swam toward him, appearing curious. They'd turn and swim away, then come back toward him again. So did a flock of ducks.
"It's as if they were saying, 'Come with us,' " Zajanc says. "After 23 days away from civilization, you'd think the only thing on your mind would be getting out and getting some food, but I just wanted to take off again. The idea struck me like somebody had slapped me."
The following summer he returned to the peninsula, alone, with his meager supplies.
"I've taken a lot of
trips without food," Zajanc says. "My interests are psychology and philosophy, and I'm interested in how the mind works when you have to eat simple repetitive foods. You're imitating the life of primitive man."
He traveled about 200 miles in 20 days that first summer, living off the land, walking out of King Salmon, Alaska, and south into the wilderness.
The next year, he returned to where he'd left off and walked another 250 miles farther south on the peninsula.
Year Three brought a change of venue, and Zajanc tackled a long trek in the Arctic.
"I'd taken no food, and it's critical to get a variety of nutrients," Zajanc says. "Without them you become very lethargic, and it's hard to take a step. People have asked me what I'd think about while I was alone for so long, and a lot of the time all I thought about was how to get from where I was to 10 feet in front of me. Three miles could take hours and hours."
Food was a bigger problem in the Arctic than it had been on the peninsula, where his mostly fish diet was supplemented by the occasional grouse, ptarmigan, duck or porcupine he'd shoot.
"There was one point in the Arctic when I hadn't eaten a thing for 1 1/2 days, and I saw this river off in the distance," he says.
Starving and cold, and carrying his 40 pounds of gear on his back, he painstakingly made his way to the river.
"It was glacial," Zajanc says. "That means it's filled with silt, and the chance of catching a fish was remote. There aren't that many fish in glacial rivers to begin with, and the ones that are there can't see anything because of the silt. Tears came to my eyes."
Yet, this is what Zajanc was there for. To test himself. To see how he'd react. He was still a year away from even pondering the idea of walking across parts of Alaska he hadn't seen yet, spending more years to connect the dots and complete an unlikely journey.
But now, all he could think of was surviving, a few more hours, one more day.
"A lot of life is overcoming fears," Zajanc says. "Do we see life clearly when we're looking at it through our fears?"
He camped there that night, his belly growling for food, and headed inland the next morning, weak from hunger.
"I finally found a clear stream with a few old salmon in it," Zajanc says. "Their meat was white, not pink, which means there aren't many nutrients in it. So I ate their roe and other internal parts like the liver, where I could get what my body needed."
It was on this trip that Zajanc had his most frightening encounter with a bear.
"Ninety-nine percent of them don't want anything to do with you, but this bear was dangerous," he says. "It made four bluff charges at me."
The old "Bear, what are you doing?" shouts had no effect on this one. It ignored Zajanc, kept coming closer and closer, occasionally thundering forward at top speed.
When it was 30 feet from him, Zajanc pulled out his .22 and fired at the ground a few feet from the bear, kicking up dirt.
The bear stopped and bristled up - a sign that it was about to charge for real.
"I don't recommend this in a bear encounter," Zajanc says, "but I bristled up. I became this skinny little human trying to act tough, yelling and threatening the bear. I felt like a little Pomeranian yapping at some giant ferocious dog."
The bear finally backed off into the bushes, but Zajanc was sure this was not the end of it. He gathered his gear, retreated to his campsite 200 yards away, and was breaking camp when he saw the bear charge out of the brush and back to the spot where they had first met.
"The instincts of bears make them most dangerous when they're guarding a kill," Zajanc says. "I found it interesting that that's exactly what I did. I was protecting my food at all costs."
In the end, the path that Zajanc chose - not that there was an actual path, mind you - covered 3,000 miles, but he says he wouldn't be surprised that, in his serpentine wanderings, he actually walked closer to 5,000.
Even over the most seemingly barren of tundra landscapes, there was never a straight line to get from Point A to Point B. Lakes, bogs and other obstacles made every day's journey a circuitous one, like the football player who runs 30 yards sideways in order to gain 3 upfield.
"My philosophy from the first day was I would follow the beauty, detour for adventure, and seek the hidden path of knowledge," Zajanc says. "Following the beauty almost got me killed several times."
But oh, the things he saw.
Thirty-three bears in one day.
The insides of volcanoes.
White grizzlies.
A white wolf.
Sunrises and sunsets above the Arctic Circle that would last hours, not minutes - "as if Michelangelo had painted something just for me," Zajanc says.
There was the night of the "moonbow," where the light of the moon reflecting through a night rainstorm created a white rainbow. There were rivers that ran bright orange there were so many spawning salmon in them. And the tundra swans whose perfectly synchronized fllight across a blue sky made Zajanc feel like they'd spent a lifetime practicing for this one moment.
There was the comical, too.
Zajanc took a small inflatable raft on many of his trips north, and was paddling down a salmon-rich stream when he saw it.
Actually, he heard it first. Snoring. Loud snoring.
It came from a brown bear who had eaten so much he couldn't drag his bloated gut out of the water before he fell asleep. The bear's head rested on shore, his body was still in the water as ZZZZZZs escaped from his mouth.
"His butt was 4 feet across," says Zajanc, who has pictures of what he calls the "hippo bear."
"He was easily 10 feet tall on his hind legs, and a thousand pounds," he says.
Zajanc hollered at him. "Hey bear!"
The bear slowly lifted and turned its head. Spied the human. He staggered up on all fours, climbed up on shore and considered Zajanc for a moment.
"Then he turned," Zajanc says. "He wiggled his stomach, lifted his tail and shot a solid streak of salmon goo out of his rear and 6 feet into the water. He turned his head and looked at me, and I could swear he was smirking."
It was no snoring
Zajanc heard one evening on another of his journeys.
A bush pilot had dropped him in the middle of nowhere in the Arctic, at least 100 miles from the nearest Native village, to start another leg of his trip. He was alone again, beginning another month in the wilds of Alaska. Zajanc set up his tent, unpacked his fishing gear and had made all of two casts with his pole when he heard it:
A boat motor.
Five toothless Eskimo males came chugging round the bend. There's no telling who was more surprised to see whom.
"What are you doing here?" they asked Zajanc.
Over the years, Zajanc discovered that people who lived their entire lives in remote parts of this wild country thought anyone who would try to walk across Alaska was both crazy and fascinating.
"Do you want to go hunting with us?" they asked.
He climbed in.
"It was more caribou fishing than hunting," Zajanc says. "There was a spot where caribou crossed the river. In the old days the Natives would spear them as they crossed, but this was sort of like car hunting in a boat. They'd wait till the caribou were in the water, speed up, shoot them and drag them to shore."
Zajanc got a 4-pound caribou liver for dinner out of the deal, and by the next morning, word had spread that this crazy white man was camped nearby.
An old, old Eskimo appeared at Zajanc's tent flap.
"You want breakfast?" the man asked.
"My mother raised ugly boys, but not stupid ones," says Zajanc, who walked several hundred yards with the old man to an Eskimo camp. Anticipating a month of little but fish, Zajanc started this trip with a meal of eggs, bacon, coffee "and then the good stuff" - oil-rich seal.
Days like this made up for the others, when he might go two or more days without finding anything to eat. After one extended period without food, Zajanc stumbled on a lake with a school of silver salmon in it, and was so hungry he stripped the skin off the fish he caught and devoured that first, before turning to the meat.
"I ate it like a bear," he says. "Stayed there for two days eating salmon until I was strong enough to go on."
The scariest moment over 10 years and all those thousands of miles came not from an encounter with a bear, or being trapped on a mountainside in a blizzard, or from going two or more days without a thing to eat and no food in sight.
It was an encounter with humans.
Zajanc had four trips and about 1,000 miles under his belt before it occurred to him that he might actually be able to lay claim to having crossed Alaska on foot, albeit in different segments and not always traveling the same direction.
It changed his priorities - though he never abandoned his "follow-the-beauty/detour-for-adventure" philosophy - and the test switched from surviving in the wild to completing the journey.
He started taking some food with him on his long hikes - soups, oatmeal, jerky - and packing a pistol along with that .22 rifle, in case of another bad bear encounter.
And he began five years tackling the Alaskan interior, connecting the routes he'd traveled on the peninsula with the ones he'd taken in the Arctic.
It was on one of these trips, when he was hiking in and near Denali National Park, that Zajanc spied the hunting lodge.
He walked up. Knocked on the door.
Inside the lodge,
the two couples stared at each other.
The owners, an outfitter/bush pilot and his wife from Anchorage, had owned the place for 30 years.
In 30 years, no one had ever knocked on the door of their lodge.
Back in Anchorage, they probably wouldn't think twice about answering a knock at their door.
Out here, it frightened them to death.
There were shouts through the door. "Who are you?" "What do you want?"
Marty Zajanc was 18 days into this wilderness trip on foot, and looking every bit the part.
"I was half-starved after 200 tough miles," he says.
His explanations - he was walking across Alaska, he wasn't exactly sure of his destination on this leg - didn't help. He usually had an idea where he intended to end up, but often would land up to 200 miles from wherever that was.
Even after the man opened the door, the situation remained tense. In the background, his wife kept repeating, "Nobody does that. Nobody does that."
The man told Zajanc to wait outside, and closed the door. When he re-appeared, he told Zajanc to go camp at a nearby lake.
Then he added, "My wife wanted me to tell you: That door you just knocked on? There's a shotgun next to it. You come near us again and I'll use it."
"I'd gotten used to being treated as a celebrity," Zajanc says. "When I'd get to a Native village, people were always so curious about what I was doing and wanted to talk. When I came across outfitters in the wilderness, they'd say, 'You're doing what? And you're still alive? Do you want a job?'
"To be threatened with a shotgun, by someone you'd just told the same story to, was quite disconcerting."
Zajanc, as you might have guessed, is an interesting fellow - and when the outfitter showed up at his camp the next morning, much calmer, to apologize and talk, he discovered just that.
Eventually, he even offered Zajanc a job guiding hunters. Zajanc turned him down, but later hired the outfitter-bush pilot who had once threatened him with a shotgun to fly him to one of his starting points.
Zajanc grew up in Oakridge, Ore., 60 miles southeast of Eugene. After his parents divorced when he was in fourth grade, he moved with his mother to the Los Angeles area.
After high school he went to college for a while, first back in Oregon, then in California, but quickly decided the beaten path was not the one he was meant to follow.
At the age of 20, he set out for Montana - his father had originally been from Libby - and landed in the Yellow Bay area on Flathead Lake's East Shore.
He found work as a caretaker at a cherry orchard, which gave him a free place to stay. He's done a little of this, a little of that (even though he's never shot a big-game animal himself, he does guide hunters).
He never married or had kids, and for nearly 35 years has lived a very simple lifestyle.
"My wealth is my free time," Zajanc says. "Free time feels like thousand-dollar bills falling out of my pockets."
He drives an ancient Datsun pickup. Doesn't own a home. Doesn't eat at restaurants.
"I'd rather save my money for the big adventures than go out," says Zajanc, who recently moved from the orchard and into Polson to help care for his mother, Madeline.
But how can he afford so many trips to Alaska?
By flying to Australia.
"You can get a $1,200 flight to Australia," says Zajanc, who travels there to pursue another of his passions, surfing.
He uses frequent flier miles from trips like that - he's also had adventures in Europe, Turkey, Greece, New Zealand and the South Seas - to get free airfare to Alaska.
No matter where he goes, he stays in sleeping bags, not hotels, and mostly eats what he can hunt or catch, not what Applebee's offers on its menu.
And 30 days in the wilderness, he points out, usually equals 30 days where you haven't spent one dime.
On the sixth segment of his journey, Marty Zajanc felt like he truly belonged in Alaska doing this, like he had really earned his stripes.
He went in winter.
Traveling from Manley Hot Springs northwest of Fairbanks, across the frozen Yukon River, and on to the small village of Allakaket just below the Arctic Circle, Zajanc completed this segment on cross-country skis.
It was March, but it was definitely still winter. The temperatures reached
40 below some days. The ice on the Yukon was still 7 feet thick. Even with every inch of his face protected, his eyeballs started to freeze as he skied into a stiff wind on the last day.
"I didn't even know that was possible," Zajanc says.
His longest single journey was inside the Arctic Circle. It covered 550 miles (again, that's the straight-line distance) and took 35 days.
He took 1999 off - sort of. The trip the year before had taken the biggest physical toll of any, and he did not feel ready to tackle another segment the following summer. But he still spent three weeks in the backcountry of Alaska that year.
In 2000, he resumed his quest. By June of 2006, a bush pilot deposited Zajanc along the Kugururuk River in the Brooks Range, about
100 miles northeast of the village of Noatak.
He was 500 miles from Barrow, the North Slope town he'd chosen as his finish line.
Zajanc traveled north until he hit the Arctic Ocean near Icy Cape, then turned east to traverse the rugged shoreline.
June turned to July. It snowed on him twice in July. It was hard going.
About 150 miles from Barrow he came across a husband and wife on an all-terrain vehicle - the first people he'd seen in nearly three weeks - and knew he was nearing Wainwright.
"There was an old hotel in town with eight rooms and a little restaurant," Zajanc says. "I went in and ordered a hamburger, which cost $12.50. I was a little on edge. I had 150 miles left to go and my confidence was flagging."
An ancient woman approached him at his table. The lines were etched into her face like canyons. An occasional tooth protruded from otherwise empty gums.
"What are you doing here?" she demanded of the stranger.
Zajanc explained. He was walking to Barrow, the last 150 miles of a 3,000-mile trip across Alaska on foot.
"Are you crazy?" the old woman asked.
"These are people who live in the toughest culture on the planet, in the worst climate in the world, and they're calling me crazy," Zajanc says.
The woman sat down at his table. Then she raised her hands in the air and seemed to go into a trance. Finally, she spoke.
"A polar bear will sniff you out," she said, her eyes shut tight. "It is going to sniff you out and eat you."
"That really shook me up," Zajanc says. "I'm 150 miles from completing this, and I'm scared. I stayed in town an extra day trying to figure out what to do."
Heck, he was already on the Arctic Ocean. He'd crossed Alaska.
But ever since deciding he was going to attempt this unusual journey midway through it, he'd had Barrow - the northernmost point in the United States - in mind as his final destination.
"Once again - our fears, are they valid?" Zajanc says. "I'd been dreaming of this for years and years. Sure, it was dangerous, but I'd made it all the way across Alaska. I was glad I hadn't started this until I was in my 40s. If I'd done it when I was younger, I think my ego would have got me killed. I thought, 'Is it worth the risk?' I finally decided, 'Yeah, it is.' "
He pressed on, his eyes always open for the polar bear that was going to eat him.
When the Barrow skyline - if you can call it that - came into view, "it looked like a mirage," Zajanc says.
"I had blisters all over my feet and my heels were ripped up," he goes on. "I had flashbacks of the entire journey. But I felt so privileged to have walked this land."
On July 11, 2006, Marty Zajanc hiked into Barrow.
He hadn't set out to walk across Alaska, but at least he had the answer to the question, "Who would?"
He not only would, he had.
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com.
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