About the Book

A deeply American saga of renunciation and renewal-a rollicking local history that is also a lyrical exploration of time, loss, and change... and a pulsating account of the morning that brought Alaska's ghost town decades to an end.

Book Synopsis

In this history of life in an isolated ghost town, bestselling Alaska author Tom Kizzia unfolds a deeply American saga of renunciation and renewal. The spirit of Alaska in the old days-impetuous, free-wheeling, and bounty-blessed-lived on in the never-quite-abandoned mining town of McCarthy. While the new state boomed in the pipeline era, cagey old-timers and young back-to-the-landers forged a rough wilderness community that lived by its own rules.

As the T'ang Dynasty mountain poet Han Shan wrote, "If your heart was like mine, you'd get it and be right here."

The Wrangell Mountains developed a reputation as a hermit kingdom, "contrary and self-reliant, where settlers tougher than the rest of us salvaged, in post-apocalyptic fashion, the rusted relics of a profligate past." But history had its eyes on McCarthy. Pressures grew to improve access for tourists and speculators, and to cordon off the wild surroundings in a national park. Here is the story, hopeful but haunted, of those latter-day pioneers-from the afternoon the last copper train left the valley, to the icy morning when a man with a rifle brought the lost decades to an end.

Cold Mountain Path is loaded with vivid accounts of heroes and lovers, crackpots and con artists, feuding prospectors and daring bush pilots. An outlaw who became Alaska's iconic art-museum sourdough. A secret government plan to explode an atomic bomb. A young Harvard graduate who followed the path of ascetic Chinese poetry into marriage with a mountain man. A loner who decided Nature would be better off with all of them gone.

And tying the half-century together, the life story of a cantankerous and idealistic homesteader, Jim Edwards, who lived in the valley longer than any of them, "the ghost in Alaska's rear-view mirror."

Beyond the whimsical reminiscing of old-timers, the book is also a serious environmental history: a meditation on ghost towns, a funhouse-mirror reflection of modern Alaska, and an on-the-ground recounting of the conservation battle to create the country's largest national park.

Tom Kizzia's previous book, Pilgrim's Wilderness, was named Alaska's best True Crime book by the New York Times. Amazon pegged the book at Number 5 among its Top 100 Best Books of the Year. Outside Magazine called it "a gripping nonfiction thriller told with masterful clarity."

Now the author brings those narrative skills to the untold story of a town that dreamed it could stay hidden in the snows of the past.

Review Quotes

A beautifully written story about the sometimes difficult but almost always generous people who made their lives amidst the wilderness . . . Kizzia tells of their struggles with the land, with each other, and with themselves. Harder to avoid were the outside forces . . . Kizzia, a masterful writer, delivers one beautiful sentence after another. This is a beautiful book. - David James, Anchorage Daily News

It is impossible to choose one book to represent Alaska because our state is so varied. There are rainforests and the Arctic tundra, tiny villages and cities, and over 100 languages spoken, from Ahtna to Zulu. But Cold Mountain Path is a good place to start. It's an excellent history of McCarthy, Alaska, in the 20th century. McCarthy was home to a world-class copper mine. After the mines closed in 1938, all sorts of characters remained, and more arrived in the following decades, creating a kind of only-in-Alaska community. This is a story about the Alaska that we once were and that I think many of us feel we are losing." - National Public Radio, Books for Travelers Summer 2022. Nominated by Alaska State Writer Laureate Heather Lende

Chosen by National Public Radio as "essential reading" for anyone traveling to Alaska, Kizzia's lively, often humorous historical account of the remote copper mining town of McCarthy tucked beneath the Wrangell Mountains will astound you with its descriptions of bush country life in Alaska from 1938 to 1982. A book that begins and ends with the effects of a mass murder in a remote small town. Thrilling reading. - Richard Chiappone, author of The Hunger of Crows

It is also an environmental history, one that without ever belaboring the point examines how people come to value land and place, and how contestations over that value remain at the core of Alaskan-and American-social life . . . Cold Mountain Path is, for readers in the lower 48, both an introduction to a particularly Alaskan place and a story that situates Alaska in broad themes of the American 20th century: the relationship to land and ownership, the tensions between individualism and community, our relationship with government near and far, our hopes for the future and knowledge of the past. All of this is situated in a place that changes as dynamically as its people, told with great care and in the restrained poetry of Kizzia's prose. - Bathsheba Demuth, author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

The story spans an arc as grand as the landscape surrounding McCarthy, with characters equally magnificent. - Michael Armstrong, Homer News

The vivid descriptions of some of these folks, their ingenuity and their pranks, will have some readers laughing. - Margaret Bauman, The Cordova Times

It's a story of paradoxes and contradictions, of human settlement and wilderness, and of the challenges involved in navigating multiple truths. - Vivian Wagner