Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail

From the New York Times bestselling author of Chesapeake Requiem comes an intricately plotted tale of two end-to-end adventures through the Appalachian Trail’s twenty-two hundred miles, braided around a third strand, that of the trail’s most notorious tragedy that has haunted Earl Swift for thirty years.

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.

"Masterful...A intimate, meticulously reported, and captivating account of life on the island." - Washington Post

"The best nonfiction book of 2018...I can't remember a book in recent years that taught me quite so much. Every page is vivid and rich...A model for what serious reportage should be." - Stephen L. Carter, Bloomberg

“Earl Swift is as much a master of crafting words on the page as capturing the instructive voices on this shrinking Chesapeake island. He has written not a farewell but a commencement, not an insular but a universal story, one we all should know, of challenge, forbearance, and possibilities.” - JACK E. DAVIS, author of The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea, winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in History