Available in bookstores, on Amazon, or from the publisher.

Winner of two IBPA Ben Franklin awards

Published October 2021

from Porphyry Press

a portion of sales support the
McCarthy-Kennicott Historical Museum

Han Shan Cold Mountain Poems translated by Gary Snyder - reprinted by permission of Counterpoint Press

Photo of Erie Mine by Paul Scannell

Home page and cover photo of tracks by Lynn A. Yehle, courtesy of Department of the Interior, U. S. Geological Survey

“This is a story about the Alaska that we once were and that I think many of us feel we are losing.” Alaska writer laureate Heather Lende, on NPR.

Even before we landed that first morning, I had questions. 

The McCarthy-Kennecott valley had a reputation as a hermit kingdom, contrary and self-reliant. Who were these people? In modern day Alaska, what were they looking for in a remote ghost town? 

The questions changed when I climbed down onto the snowy airstrip. I was a police reporter at the scene of a mass shooting. Whatever it was that drew them to the wilderness, someone hated them for it.

I wrote in the newspaper about the 1983 murders. Then I came back. I built a recreational cabin in the valley, becoming an inholder in the newest and biggest national park in North America.

Later, I found myself writing about the valley again when a fight broke out over  the new park’s rules. At the heart of that fight was a large Bible-quoting family—fifteen children dressed in pioneer garb by their father, a charismatic scoundrel who had dragged them to Alaska searching for the Gates of Hell. Those news stories turned into a book about how the children escaped their father’s wrath. Along the way I started learning more about life before the park—about what it was like before that morning on the snowy airstrip.

Now here is the story of those lost decades. Finally, I got to answer my questions about this place. 

For half a century, an old and makeshift way of life had persisted against the undertow of the past, that ebbing toward the nature that was here before. I was just in time, it seemed, to piece together the story of the last hold-outs when the copper trains left in 1938, and how they were joined through the years by a gallery of prospectors, grifters, dreamers, escape artists, hippies, speculators, preachers, and outlaws.  

There was the old Black trapper from Mississippi, who wrote letters about how happy he was when the people left the valley and the animals came back. And the dangerously unbalanced crackpot whose grizzled visage earned him a place as Alaska’s iconic art-museum Sourdough. Also the 1959 government plan to explode an atomic bomb inside the Bonanza Mine. 

Some of the accounts haunt me still—like the story of the young Harvard religion graduate who followed a path of ascetic Chinese poetry to the Wrangells, where she became the bride of a mountain man, only to be gunned down at his side.

We all have ghost towns, impermanent places we dream of returning to. This was Alaska’s. 

“The stories Kizzia brings to the pages of this book are fascinating and memorable. McCarthy is a bit of a microcosm of Alaska itself, a place people have gone to reinvent themselves. Over the course of this book, readers meet a parade of outsiders, mountain men, tourism promoters, scavengers, artists, hippies, the occasional pimp and even singer John Denver. The murders place a horrifying end to this story, but Kizzia primarily celebrates the lives that were lived in McCarthy. This is the Alaska that myths were made of.”

-David James, Anchorage Daily News, Dec. 18, 2022