Cold Mountain Path: The Ghost Town Decades of McCarthy-Kennecott, Alaska Kizzia TomPaperback

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