Keepers of the High Pass
A Mountain Rescue Saga

About this book:

When the autumn wind howls through Crawford Notch, it doesn't just strip the leaves from the trees—it strips the illusions from the city folk who venture into the White Mountains wearing wool coats and carrying leather satchels, believing a ticket bought in Boston buys them safe passage. In 1840, Ephraim Hale is simply a farmer with a cabin perched on the edge of the wilderness, a wife who reads the weather like scripture, and a seven-year-old son learning that in these mountains, childhood is a luxury no one can afford. But when a painter and his guide disappear into the freezing dark above the tree line, Ephraim shoulders his rope and climbing spikes and climbs into the storm—because someone must, and no one else will.

What begins as a single desperate rescue becomes a generations-spanning saga of the family who became the mountain's conscience. From the brutal Frost of 1841 to the Great September Storm, from the avalanche paths of Tuckerman Ravine to the icy jaws of the Great Gulf, the Hales stand between hubris and survival. They are the ones who haul broken bodies down ice-slick granite, who know which cairn marks the path and which leads to a precipice, who understand that the mountain does not hate you—it simply does not care.

Spanning six decades and twenty-six chapters, *Keepers of the High Pass* is a masterwork of historical adventure that renders the White Mountains as vividly as any character: beautiful, indifferent, and lethally patient. Here is the forge where ordinary people are hammered into guardians, where a boy learns to hold a tail-rope before he's tall enough to reach the anvil, and where every rescue is a covenant written in frost and blood. For readers who crave the visceral authenticity of *The Revenant* and the generational sweep of *Lonesome Dove*, this is the mountain saga you've been waiting to climb.