A Review of Tom Kizzia’s Cold Mountain Path

By Vivian Wagner

I read Tom Kizzia’s Cold Mountain Path: The Ghost Town Decades of McCarthy-Kennecott, Alaska after a recent move to Alaska, and the book captures my experiences of the palimpsest nature of both the McCarthy area and the state as a whole. This is a book about layers and about the difficulty of getting to any one truth about a place.

In this book, Kizzia tells the story of what he calls “the ghost town decades” of McCarthy-Kennecott, exploring how layers of stories t...