Up On Cove Mountain by Earl Swift

About the book: 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 coloured 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: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail 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.

Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail will be on sale on 18 August 2026.

About the author: Earl Swift is the author of the New York Times bestseller Chesapeake Requiem, which was named to ten best-of-the-year lists. His most recent book, Hell Put to Shame, was a finalist for the Edgar Award (Best Fact Crime) and the Virginia Literary Award. A former reporter for The Virginian-Pilot and a contributor to Outside and other publications, he lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains west of Charlottesville.