Up on Cove Mountain

Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail

"An extraordinary portrait of the AT." —Outside

34 years after hiking the Appalachian Trail, Earl Swift returned, haunted by a tragedy that befell two of his fellow hikers .

"A deeply personal meditation on death, aging and nature." —New York Times

"A masterpiece of the trail." —Radical Grammar

“A helluva book.” —John Grisham

In 1990, a youthful Earl Swift backpacked the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia, a transformative experience that colored every aspect of his later life. He emerged from his hike across the rugged, sky-high roof of fourteen eastern states a sharper and more organized thinker, a better problem solver, and a committed outdoorsman.

But he also left the AT with baggage: Early in his odyssey, he spent time with a couple of other southbounders, who were friendly, capable, and doing everything right, but who were nonetheless murdered weeks later at a mountaintop campsite in Pennsylvania—a fit of violence that the killer never explained.

Half a lifetime later, Swift returned to the trail to find out whether he was still, in his sixties, equal to the AT’s roller-coaster terrain. Driving him, too, was a quest for answers that had nagged at him since that first hike: What had happened at that campsite to turn two smart, bighearted people into prey? Why had fate chosen them, when other hikers—Swift included—seemed more likely candidates? And how could such a grisly episode have unfolded in the backcountry’s sylvan loveliness, not to mention one of the safest places around?

Up on Cove Mountain is the arresting account of Swift’s 2024 trek through the AT’s enduring wonders and the ghosts of its past, a chronicle of swashbuckling adventure coupled with a meditation on the nature of risk and the risks of nature.

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