Drawing on work for his new book, Cold Mountain Path, author and journalist Tom Kizzia will discuss the evolution of the Wrangell Mountains community in the half-century between the departure of the last copper train and the coming of the National Park Service. His talk will weigh some of the larger cultural meanings of ghost towns and their importance to a fuller understanding of the Alaska pioneer narrative of development and success. This is the second lecture in the 2021-22 CIHS season.

Tom Kizzia traveled widely in rural Alaska during a 25-year career as a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News. He is the author of the bestseller Pilgrim’s Wildernessand the Alaska village travel narrative The Wake of the Unseen Object, recently re-issued by University of Alaska Press in the Classic Reprint Series. His journalism has appeared in The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, and in Best American Science and Nature Writing 2017. He received a Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Award fellowship and was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University. A graduate of Hampshire College, he lives in Homer, Alaska, and has a place in the Wrangell Mountains near McCarthy.

Cook Inlet Historical Society Lecture: The Ghost Town Decades of McCarthy-Kennecott, Alaska