LEADER 00000cam  2200373 i 4500 
001    1273287447 
003    OCoLC 
005    20220901152545.0 
008    210628t20212021akuab    b    000 0deng d 
010      2021942097 
020    1736755811|qpbk. 
020    9781736755815|qpbk. 
040    XYZ|beng|erda|cDLC|dUtOrBLW 
042    lccopycat 
043    n-us-ak 
092    979.805|bKIZ 
100 1  Kizzia, Tom,|eauthor. 
245 10 Cold Mountain path :|bthe ghost town decades of McCarthy-
       Kennecott, Alaska 1938-1983 /|cTom Kizzia. 
250    1st ed. 
264  1 [McCarthy, Alaska] :|bPorphyry Press,|c[2021] 
264  4 |c©2021 
300    xi, 327 pages :|billustrations, map ;|c22 cm 
336    text|btxt|2rdacontent 
337    unmediated|bn|2rdamedia 
338    volume|bnc|2rdacarrier 
504    Includes bibliographical references. 
520    "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."--Publisher website. 
650  0 Pioneers|zAlaska|zMcCarthy|xHistory. 
650  0 Frontier and pioneer life|zAlaska|zMcCarthy. 
651  0 McCarthy (Alaska)|xHistory. 
651  0 Kennecott Copper Mine (Alaska)|xHistory. 
651  0 Wrangell Mountains (Alaska)|xHistory.