Cold Mountain Path

<p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>As the T'ang Dynasty mountain poet Han Shan wrote If your heart was like mine you'd get it and be right here.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>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.</p><p><br></p><p>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. </p><p><br></p><p>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.</p>