Tom Kizzia

Documents the story of Robert "Papa Pilgrim" Hale and the antiestablishment family settlement in remote Alaska that was eventually exposed as a cult-like prison where Hale brutalized and isolated his wife and 15 children, describing the torturous abuse endured by the family before his older children escaped and reported Hale to authorities.

A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier

Pilgrim's Wilderness

We all have ghost towns. Impermanent places we dream of returning to. Here was Alaska's. In 1938, the last copper train left the Wrangell Mountains. But the spirit of the old days-free-wheeling, self-reliant, bounty-blessed-lived on in the remote town of McCarthy. The valley's few holdouts were joined over time by a gallery of prospectors, grifters, back-to-the-landers, dreamers, escape artists, hippies, speculators, preachers, and outlaws. While the rest of Alaska boomed in the new oil age, an old and makeshift way of life persisted against the quiet undertow of the past, that ebbing toward the wilderness that was here before us. Then the modern world found its way back in. A road, a bridge, a national park. A mass shooting that left six dead. Cold Mountain Path is a deeply American saga of renunciation and renewal--a rollicking local history that is also a lyrical exploration of time, loss, and change. . . and a pulsating account of the morning that brought Alaska's ghost town decades to an end. Tom Kizzia's previous book, Pilgrim's Wilderness, was an Amazon Top-Ten Book of the Year and was named Alaska's best True Crime book by the New York Times. Kizzia has written for The New Yorker and was a longtime reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. He has a place of his own near McCarthy.

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

"In the course of a two-year odyssey . . . Kizzia visited numerous native settlements, interviewed leaders and followers, and wrote the feature articles that make up this charming, informative book. . . . Kizzia writes a clear, unobtrusive prose that crystallizes in memorable images."--Washington Post. "A boatful of native Alaskans slapping downriver through the chop on their way to the biggest softball game of the season. A hunter singing the old songs for hunting luck, as he snowmobiles onto the ice with his rifle. Such contrasts--Eskimo and outsider, ancient and modern--run through Tom Kizzia's chronicle of travels in the Alaska bush in search of 'ancestral landscapes.'"--Smithsonian. "Kizzia writes with a quiet compassion that brings the people and their hard land clearly into focus."--Boston Globe. "Kizzia . . . is a thoughtful and lyrical writer who manages to be sensitive without veering into sentimentality. . . . [He] joined Eskimos and Athabaskan Indians in steambaths and softball games. He visited their homes and their Russian Orthodox churches and their fishing camps. He even went on a ruthless whale hunt with two young Eskimos, a skiff and a .22-caliber rifle. A careful and sympathetic observer."--Philadelphia Inquirer. Tom Kizzia is a journalist at the Anchorage Daily News.

Tom Kizzia

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