Running Wild With Marc

                      

With the good spring frisbee weather starting up, I was thinking of my old buddy friend Marc Salak again. If there was a guy born to be able to play the grueling sport called ultimate frisbee it would have been Marc as he was a real wild man at everything he did and ultimate frisbee tournaments were just another one of many of his driving passions. 

Typical Marc; running for six hours two days in a row playing ultimate frisbee and then following it up by moving boulders for the kids on the way back home.  

Along the beach way down in Baja, Al Sur Mexico Marc broke deep into the ocean waves laying out to catch a long frisbee toss and came up with a Puffer Fish too.

Marc was always running with unlimited energy. Great spirit and sorely missed by all that knew him. This post is dedicated to all of Marc's friends and family.

 Cooling off in a stone house after a pretty grueling hike up a 6000 foot mountain somewhere out of La Paz, Baja Al Sur, Mexico.

We drove all the way from La Jolla, Ca to get to this remote site on the Pacific coast of Baja el Norte, Mexico for Marc to give this fine specimen of a Cardon' cactus a big hug before the sun set. Really the only reason he ever wanted to be in one of his pictures was because he was exactly 6' feet tall and he used himself as a tool to illustrate scientific scale for his subjects.

This Fast Boojum plant was measured by us to be approximately 77' feet high.

Marc at one of his favorite sites playing with the Crawling Cactus along the Pacific Coast in Baja al Sur, Mexico. These cactus grew along the ground or over cliffs. Marc had visited this rare site numerous times over the years and had pictures of them that looked like they were crawling along the ground...thus the name Crawling Cactus. 

   Over the years that I knew Marc, I scanned all of his travel images; negatives, transparencies and prints, and also captured digitally or photographed a large bulk of his art and exhibits in his endless quest to log all that he had created onto a CD's so that he could make prints or show people via computer what he made or where he had been in his travels and what he saw or found new.

Marc brought over much of his prized hand crafted art
He would show up at my front door with several milk crates full of arrow heads wrapped in toilet paper. He literally had thousands of blades that he had crafted wishing to have photographed.

Marc made quite a bit of interesting candle sticks out of car transmission parts and sold them for a large chunk of his income for his travels.

African Porcupine Quills stabbing through either Llamas or pig fetus.

Elk and deer jaws and horns made for good knives. Marc loved to bushwhack up in Humboldt Country, California searching the hillsides in the thick brush for these carving products as the animals tended to shed them inside those deep forests certain times of the year. 

In these three knives handles we have the back one made with cactus, the middle one made with antler and the one in the foreground made of an animal jaw bone.

        Marc's exhibit was a big hit at UC Davis.

And then there was Marc's metal works from used transmission parts that were turned into moveable candle sticks, and the tie die and beautiful ceramic cookie, sugar, tea cups and so on and so on.

The old Moose poop droppings stabbed with African Porcupine Quills.

Evidently, these mazes actually were complex puzzle mazes. 

I helped Marc gather these beasties at a fishing camp in Baja, Mexico. The pillow represented his high school years which were supposed to be cozy like a pillow but in reality was rather a little bit of a horror show.

These are some of the images that I scanned for him from his travels.

Marc was not afraid of picking up bugs and spiders all the time.

Marc with a baby Baobab Tree in Madagascar.

 Marc had great energy and If I am able to visit half the places he did in his short life I will feel very fortunate as Marc traversed the globe constantly in his thirty-four years of life.