An Excerpt From Cold Mountain Path

Originally published in Issue No. 23, Spring 2022

A note from the editors: Tom Kizzia’s Cold Mountain Path is a new history of the Wrangell Mountain community of McCarthy, Alaska through its ghost town decades: the half-century between the abandonment of the Kennecott copper mines, during the Great Depression, and the coming of the National Park Service in the 1980s. The area lived on as a remnant of Old Alaska, surviving as a hermit kingdom of scavengers, escapists, and idealists into the modern days of the oil pipeline. The book ends with the tragic mass shooting of 1983, which drew a curtain on the period.

Kizzia was a longtime reporter for the Anchorage Daily News and is the author of two other books: the national bestseller Pilgrim’s Wilderness, and the village travel narrative The Wake of the Unseen Object.

The following excerpt from Cold Mountain Path is set in the mid- 1970s, as a new wave of young settlers began to appear in the Wrangell Mountains, looking to build a life in nature far from the troubled modern world. They lived by subsistence, gardening, and the constant logistical challenges of shuttling supplies from town. The new arrivals—the smart ones who managed to stick it out—sought guidance and support from the handful of old-timers who had already settled in the wilderness. None was more important to the newcomers than Jim and Maxine Edwards, who had been there since the 1950s and now lived in a hand-built homestead house at Swift Creek, across the Kennicott River from town.

Excerpted from Chapter 8, The Ghost Town Gazette

Jim and Maxine Edwards had a few neighbors in the valley, but most lived some distance away. Cliff and Maureen Wright were across the Nizina near May Creek. Once in a while they came to town, and everyone would gather at Tony Zak’s to play music on a cassette deck and watch Maureen belly dance. The Wrights divorced after nearly dying from heavy metal poisoning. The problem was traced to a natural arsenic seep in their drinking water source, a rusty, sulfur-smelling creek that never froze. The mail plane pilot saved them when he stopped at May Creek and observed their pallor.

Closer at hand were the Wassermans, a young couple who showed up on the west side of the river in 1974. Eric and Joan Wasserman were college graduates from New York City who moved to Alaska to live in the bush. They found out about McCarthy one night when Eric was hitchhiking in Anchorage and got picked up by Sumner Putman. The hippie pilot described how he liked to take a small hit of acid, soar high above the Nizina River, cut his engine, and drift in wide descending circles until he got to fifteen hundred feet.

Eric was tall and dark-bearded. Joan, sunny and brown-haired, wore a headkerchief as they worked on their gambrel-roof log cabin. “Everything you did, you appreciated it. You were doing everything for yourself,” Joan later recalled. They learned on the job. They didn’t have a drawknife to peel house logs, and Eric went to see his new neighbor. Jim Edwards pulled open a drawer holding six drawknives and invited Eric to help himself. “He showed me his pipe wrenches. He had them from six inches to six feet. I assume they all came out of Kennecott.” Jim struck some people as irritatingly stubborn, but with Eric he was generous with time and tools. His reputation as a skinflint was legendary—asking for hot water at the lodge as he withdrew a driedup tea bag from his shirt pocket, or turning off the propane before the beans were done and letting them finish with residual heat. That he had a small portfolio of stocks, and occasionally passed along to Eric a Wall Street Journal sent by his father via mail plane, added mystery.

Maxine enjoyed having Joan Wasserman for a neighbor. Maxine took Joan berry-picking in the fall, and in early summer to a secret grove of white wildflowers surrounded by purple ones—albino lupine. Joan found it hard to keep up with Maxine, who chewed coffee beans for energy. Joan thought Maxine was a good partner for Jim because they were both Capricorns and loved nature. When Joan was pregnant and broke her wrist, Jim flew her to Glennallen in his plane. The Wassermans played dominoes with the Edwards kids when Jim and Maxine came to visit. “Joan had just baked bagels when we got there, and also some yogurt and cookies, so I guess we timed that right,” Maxine wrote to Jim’s father. “Have you ever eaten bagels? They’re good—kind of a hard roll. I think she said you boil them in water, before baking them. I think bagels are Jewish.”

Another young woman welcomed into the valley by Maxine was Bonnie Morris. Bonnie was a skin-sewer of leather and fur. On winter nights, she made parkas on a treadle sewing machine in a little cabin by headlamp. When she first arrived with her boyfriend in the fall of 1977, lugging a box of books on Taoism and Sufism and old Rex Beach novels, she was struck not so much by the isolation as by the community, and in particular the handful of tough and savvy local women, in some ways playing traditional women’s roles but also liberated by the need to take care of everything on their own. Bonnie had grown up hearing Alaska stories of “wrestling grizzly bears and striking it rich—very male-oriented fantasies.” The women, she saw now, were unsung heroes. They could operate a Caterpillar, roll a fifty-five-gallon drum of diesel onto a porch, shoot a bear off the porch and skin it—but they also had an artful way of turning a social visit into a tea party, unlike their laconic and insufficiently appreciative husbands. Bonnie noticed these women often stayed isolated from one another if their husbands didn’t get along. Yet they provided moments of grace in the wilderness. She was thinking of Flo Hegland, Frieda Burdick, Fran Gagnon, Cora Andersen, a few others, and especially Maxine Edwards.

That first winter, Bonnie Morris and her boyfriend, Kelly Bay, set out to build his cabin. Bay, who would one day found Wrangell Mountain Air, the park’s main backcountry flying service, was at the time a young pipeline worker with a 1961 Ford pickup and a Homelite XL 12 chainsaw. He bought a piece of the old Doze homestead along McCarthy Creek, ignoring warnings from Les Hegland and Jim Edwards not to do business with Gordon Burdick…

Kelly and Bonnie set up a canvas ten-by-twelve-foot wall tent that October and commenced to cutting logs. They were hoping to make quick work of the cabin. The temperature soon plunged to forty below and stayed in that vicinity for five weeks. It was an exceptional cold spell, even for the upper Chitina valley. Joan Wasserman had her picture taken next to a thermometer that read minus sixty-four. It was impossible to keep a wall tent warm, especially with nothing but young green second-growth for firewood—Bonnie could sit on the woodstove. The only escape from the temperature inversions that locked down the valley floor was to climb to a friend’s angle-station cabin along the old tram lines above Kennecott, where it might be fifty degrees warmer. By midwinter, all Bonnie could think about was their next meal and their clothing—the frozen laundry, stiff as cardboard, took up half the tent. The new cabin’s walls were still only two logs high. A decade later, Bonnie Morris recalled what those pioneer women meant that first winter.

About mid-way into the winter I found that I was crying a lot and that I was overwhelmed, feeling like I’d bit off more than I could chew, and yet I felt really committed to this project. It was going so slowly and it was so hard I felt like I was really starting to lose it. I remember thinking that I’d go over and visit Maxine Edwards and take the day off. So I made a Thermos and took a little rucksack and I had bunny boots. I remember walking across the Kennicott and I didn’t know much about ice then, or crossing ice, or how to read ice with running rivers under it, and I went through slush ice along the side and got a little wet and had water in my boots. It was pretty cold in January and the days were really short, so it would have taken the whole day to walk over there. I’d have to spend the night and then come back the next day. It was a two-day journey because we had such short days—not like it is in the summer.

So I get over there and I was wet, tired, and cold and ragged out anyway, and I got over there and their house had a sense of order, where you thought it was always like that. I had no idea they started with brown chore gloves in a big alder grove and cleared it and built it. So I walk into this nice home and I remember there was this big three-decker chocolate cake sitting on this glass cake plate with a glass lid and Maxine asked, “Do you want a piece of cake?”

I’d been cooking on a Coleman stove so I said of course, I’d love a piece of cake. And I felt I was too dirty to sit in any of their furniture. And she served it on a little china plate with a little china teacup and she could kinda see my state. So I had the piece of cake and I looked up at her and I said, “Maxine, when you first came out here, did you ever cry?” She looked me right in the eye and she said, “Cry? I couldn’t stop crying for five years after I realized what I’d gotten myself into.”

I sort of burst out crying and laughing and thinking how I was getting this big lump in my throat and the tears just started pouring out and I said, “Oh, I thought there was something wrong with me.”