Cold Mountain Path
from New York Times Bestselling Author Tom Kizzia
What people have said:
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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.
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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.
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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
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It’s a story of paradoxes and contradictions, of human settlement and wilderness, and of the challenges involved in navigating multiple truths. — Vivian Wagner
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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
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In this finely crafted and insightful book, gifted Alaska writer Tom Kizzia chronicles the lives of various residents who lived in and around McCarthy, Alaska, from the closing of the railroad in 1938 to the horrific murder of six of the twenty-two living there in 1983 . . . Kizzia brilliantly folds the story of these people into the tragedy that befell them on that fateful March day. Kizzia's book is less a history than an exploration of states of mind. And in that, it's a book not to be missed by any who have wondered what really is Alaska. — Stephen Haycox, distinguished professor emeritus of History, University of Alaska Anchorage
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The story spans an arc as grand as the landscape surrounding McCarthy, with characters equally magnificent. — Michael Armstrong, Homer News
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The vivid descriptions of some of these folks, their ingenuity and their pranks, will have some readers laughing. — Margaret Bauman, The Cordova Times
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It has been a long time since I've allowed myself to spend most of a day reading. This thoughtful, well-researched, and beautifully written book is sprinkled with laugh-out-loud stories and characters as well as heartache. It captures a time and place and people that I only have experienced in tiny doses, giving me a deeper respect of and understanding for this special place. I just couldn't stop until I reached the last page. — Sara Juday, Alaska Center for the Book
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Kizzia drew from an impressive range of sources to bring the story of those years and its characters to life. In addition to conducting his own interviews, he relied on archived interviews, newspapers, books, personal journals, letters, and supreme court cases, just to name a few. This allowed the author to offer readers a glimpse into the human side of the story, while putting the local history into a state and nationwide context. — Amanda Swinehart, Copper River Record
Cold Mountain—
There’s no through trail
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 up 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.
Press + Awards
Contact us for review copies or interview or event inquiries
Audio
Alaska Public Radio interview about this book and his career, occasioned by Alaska Historical Society award · Oct 27, 2022
Triple C, KBEAR 104.1 · Oct 11, 2021
Talk of Alaska, APM · Oct 6, 2021
Kenai Conversation, KDLL · Oct 27, 2021
Mike Porcaro, KENI (1:04) · Dec 6, 2021
Print + Online
The Brevity Blog · Review by Vivian Wagner · Feb 4, 2022
Anchorage Daily News + Fairbanks Daily News-Miner · Jan 16, 2022
The Cordova Times · Nov 15, 2021
Homer News + Peninsula Clarion · Nov 3, 2021
Copper River Record · Oct 21, 2021
Awards
2022 GOLD WINNER · Bill Fisher Award, Best First Book: Nonfiction Category, Independent Book Publishers Association Ben Franklin Award
2022 SILVER WINNER · Regional Category, Independent Book Publishers Association Ben Franklin Award
2022 James H. Ducker Historian of the Year Award, Alaska Historical Society more
about the book project
A portion of book proceeds from the first year were donated to the local museum.
When Pilgrim’s Wilderness was released in 2013, one audience whose assessment concerned Tom was the local McCarthy-Kennecott community in Alaska’s Wrangell Mountains, the geographic focal point of the book. Tom wasn’t sure how the book would land with his neighbors, who had lived through the battles between the Pilgrim Family and Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.
A large crowd gathered in the Kennecott Recreation Hall that August. Tom read some passages and discussed his work, but he also read “outtakes” of local history—chapters about McCarthy before the park, which in the end he’d deleted rather than distract from the page-turning momentum of the family’s story.
His listeners embraced the book and its rendition of their community, it turned out. But they also wanted to hear more about that lost history. Not the story of the Kennecott Copper mines, which has been well-documented by researchers and the National Park Service, but stories of what happened next, after the mines closed. Memories were fading of the ghost town days, those decades before the national park, when McCarthy was “an odd, weirdly vibrant community of scavengers and schemers—a town half dead, alders clawing at its foundations, but half brimming with the kind of entrepreneurial brio that Mark Twain wrote about on an earlier Western mining frontier.”
The local McCarthy-Kennicott Historical Museum, run by volunteers, asked for copies of the “lost chapters.” Tom proposed to expand them and fill in some gaps. An Individual Artist Award fellowship from Rasmuson Foundation helped launch the new project.
Tom soon found he had tapped into a vein of Alaskana every bit as rich as the vein of copper ore that justified the Alaska Syndicate’s investments. After several years of interviewing old-timers and digging through scarce records and oral history transcripts, the project had grown into a book of its own, a portrait of an extraordinary time and place.
As Tom writes, the era of mining glories and railroad construction and bridge building had its histories, its bestselling novel, and even a Hollywood feature film. No comparable epic was ever composed of the decline and fall—of the world that remained when the bridges washed away.
Until now.
Tom teamed up with local writer, former guide, and publisher Jeremy Pataky who, with his own deep ties to the McCarthy-Kennecott area, was ready to expand his magazine and visitors guide publishing activities into book publishing, with the help of generous founding sponsors and patrons. Cold Mountain Path will be the first title for Jeremy’s new Porphyry Press. A portion of proceeds from sales of the new book will go directly to McCarthy-Kennicott Historical Museum to honor and support their mission.
Publication date: October 5, 2021
Order Cold Mountain Path
About Pilgrim’s Wilderness
“Tom Kizzia has written an uncommonly insightful book about postfrontier Alaska, an ambitious literary work disguised as a page-turner, very much in the tradition of Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before and John McPhee’s Coming into the Country. ”
– JON KRAKAUER, author of Into the Wild and Under the Banner of Heaven
“Tom Kizzia’s superb book is startling, unpredictable, haunting,clear-eyed, unrelenting, sad, and beautiful.”
— DAVID MARANISS, author of When Pride Still Mattered and They Marched Into Sunlight
"Extraordinary . . . Kizzia has done an outstanding job unpacking Pilgrim's story; the book is superbly researched, the writing clear and unflinching."
— Wall Street Journal
“This is a riveting, mesmerizing story, stunning and eloquent all at the same time. I simply couldn’t put it down.”
— KEN BURNS, filmmaker, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea and The Civil War
“Pilgrim’s Wilderness delivers the raw power and revelatory truth of a Scorsese film. Except better, because every word is true.”
— DANIEL COYLE, author of The Talent Code and coauthor of The Secret Race
Tom Kizzia reporting for the Anchorage Daily News. McCarthy, 1983.
Tom Kizzia on the Kennecott mill building
Tom presents Pilgrim's Wilderness to a packed house at the Anchorage Museum; slide shows the Old Hardware Store in McCarthy.
photo by Don Pitcher
Stairway Icefall and upper root glacier viewed from inside the Erie Mine bunkhouse. Photo by Jeremy Pataky.
Bulletin advertising Tom's public book talk in Kennecott-McCarthy, 2013
Root glacier viewed from inside the Erie Mine bunkhouse. Photo by Jeremy Pataky.
Ripe highbush cranberries in a McCarthy autumn. Photo by Jeremy Pataky.
Western Wrangell Mountains viewed from a Copper River bluff. Photo by Jeremy Pataky.
Kennicott Valley and the Kennicott Glacier toe lake, with wildfire smoke and icebergs. Photo by Jeremy Pataky.
