Two Winters on Deadman's Pass

About this book:

Ten years apart, two brutal winters. One unforgiving pass. In 1884, Thomas Miller leads a desperate party into the teeth of a Rocky Mountain blizzard to reach miners buried alive in the Golden Fleece—armed with little more than hemp rope, hand picks, and a stubborn refusal to quit. In 1894, Caleb Thorne retraces that same nightmare ascent up Deadman's Pass, haunted by the ghosts of the first rescue and racing a plummeting barometer to save five more souls trapped in the Star of the West. The mountain doesn't care about progress. It doesn't care about better gear or hard-won experience. It only cares about the cold.

Masterfully braiding dual timelines with the visceral authenticity of a man who knows the weight of wet wool and the sound of wind stripping snow off a ridge, *Two Winters on Deadman's Pass* is survival fiction at its most relentless. Here are men bound by rope and duty, crawling across ice-slick ledges four hundred feet above a black gulch, their lungs burning, their fingers freezing to metal, each step a negotiation with a mountain that has already decided to kill them. The historical detail is bone-deep—barometers and blasting powder, mule-skinning and morphine, the particular terror of a lantern gutting out in a whiteout—but it never slows the furious pace.

This is a novel about the thin line between grit and hubris, and the price the mountains extract from those who dare to answer a distress call. Fans of *The Terror* and *The Revenant* will find themselves gripping the edge of their chairs, feeling the graupel sting their own faces, hearing the wind scream like a freight train over the Divide. Two winters. Two rescues. One pass that remembers every footfall.