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.

Into the Wild meets Helter Skelter in this riveting true story of a modern-day homesteading family in the deepest reaches of the Alaskan wilderness—and of the chilling secrets of its maniacal, spellbinding patriarch. When Papa Pilgrim, his wife, and their fifteen children appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy, their new neighbors saw them as a shining example of the homespun Christian ideal. But behind the family's proud piety and beautiful old-timey music lay Pilgrim's dark past: his strange connection to the Kennedy assassination and a trail of chaos and anguish that followed him from Dallas and New Mexico. Pilgrim soon sparked a tense confrontation with the National Park Service fiercely dividing the community over where a citizen’s rights end and the government’s power begins. As the battle grew more intense, the turmoil in his brood made it increasingly difficult to tell whether his children were messianic followers or hostages in desperate need of rescue. In this powerful piece of Americana, written with uncommon grace and high drama, veteran Alaska journalist, Tom Kizzia uses his unparalleled access to capture an era-defining clash between environmentalists and pioneers ignited by a mesmerizing sociopath who held a town and a family captive.

A journey to Alaska’s remote roadless villages, during a time of great historical transition, brings us this enduring portrait of a place and its people. Alutiiq, Yup’ik, Inupiaq, and Athabascan subjects reveal themselves as entirely contemporary individuals with deep longings and connection to the land and to their past. Tom Kizzia’s account of his travels off the Alaska road system, first published in 1991, has endured with a sterling reputation for its thoughtful, poetic, unflinching engagement with the complexity of Alaska’s rural communities. Wake of the Unseen Object is now considered some of the finest nonfiction writing about Alaska. This new edition includes an updated introduction by the author, looking at what remains the same after thirty years and what is different—both in Alaska, and in the expectations placed on a reporter visiting from another world.

An award-winning author tells the stories of the audacious American politicians, military commanders, and business executives who took it upon themselves to depose monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers of other countries with disastrous long-term consequences.

**The National Bestseller** From the acclaimed, bestselling author of Turn Right at Machu Picchu, a fascinating, wild, and wonder-filled journey into Alaska, America's last frontier In 1899, railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman organized a most unusual summer voyage to the wilds of Alaska: He converted a steamship into a luxury "floating university," populated by some of America's best and brightest scientists and writers, including the anti-capitalist eco-prophet John Muir. Those aboard encountered a land of immeasurable beauty and impending environmental calamity. More than a hundred years later, Alaska is still America's most sublime wilderness, both the lure that draws one million tourists annually on Inside Passage cruises and as a natural resources larder waiting to be raided. As ever, it remains a magnet for weirdos and dreamers. Armed with Dramamine and an industrial-strength mosquito net, Mark Adams sets out to retrace the 1899 expedition. Traveling town to town by water, Adams ventures three thousand miles north through Wrangell, Juneau, and Glacier Bay, then continues west into the colder and stranger regions of the Aleutians and the Arctic Circle. Along the way, he encounters dozens of unusual characters (and a couple of very hungry bears) and investigates how lessons learned in 1899 might relate to Alaska's current struggles in adapting to the pressures of a changing climate and world.

An adventure-driven Alaskan memoir with an extraordinary dog. From a remote, abandoned cabin by the ocean where orcas breeched, beneath thirteen feet of rain, a remarkable yellow Labrador named Woody helped a runaway from the corridors of corporate America seek a fierce freedom in the Alaskan wilds. Award-winning director Ward Serrill (The Heart of the Game) discovered his Shakri-La, sixteen miles from the nearest town, and accessible only by boat, in the remote Alaskan wilderness. This little hut near a waterfall and next to the ocean is where he and Woody took up their vigil. This years-long experiment in solitude and immersion in the natural world, with Woody as his only companion, took Serrill down some dark paths, forcing him to confront the reality and the emotional cost of running away all his life. By facing his darkness, he discovers an unexplored region of his heart opened by grief that offers the true possibility of belonging.