BY KAREN BOSSICK
Jon Turk has kayaked solo around the Cape Horn, rowed the Northwest Passage, run a dog team up the east coast of Baffin Island and paddled along an ancient migration route from Ellesmore Island to Greenland.
He’s skied in Kyrgystan and cycled across the Gobi Desert in Outer Mongolia. And, most recently, the Darby, Mont., adventurer, who works in product development for North Face, took part in a National Geographic award-winning polar expedition circumnavigating Ellesmere Island.
Turk will recount his journey, which he calls “a scientist/adventurer’s journey into a Consciousness Revolution,” in a free presentation at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 7, at Ketchum’s Community Library.
The speech, which celebrates his book “Crocodiles and Ice,” is hosted by Idaho Rivers United.
“No newcomer to adventure, Turk has skied, bicycled and paddled some of the world’s most challenging terrain in inhospitable conditions for the past 50 years,” said Tina Cole. “He’s also a chemist and has written numerous environmental science and earth science textbooks. And he is a contributor to ‘Rock and Ice,’ ‘Paddler’ and ‘Sea Kayaker.’ ”
Turk says it’s necessary to explore and to subject ourselves to hardship to find the wild in our daily lives and to repair the separation from the natural world that has been imposed by the day-to-day realities of our modern urbanized world.
His latest book tells the story of his lifelong journey from suburban Connecticut into a passion for what he calls the “Deep Wild.”
“I invite my readers to listen to our Stone-Age ancestors, the poets of the '60s, a wolf that lingers, a Siberian shaman, a Chinese bicycle nomad, a lonely Tlingit warrior laying down to die in a storm, and the landscapes themselves. Because beyond the wondrous and seductive opulence of our oil-soaked, internet-crazed, consumer-oriented society, there lies a glorious and sustainable lifestyle that is based on Deep Wild as a foundation of solace, sanity, compassion, and hope,” he says.
Turk has also chronicled his passions in “The Wake of Jomon,” “The Ravens Gift,” “Cold Oceans.”