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

"An extraordinary portrait of the AT." --Outside

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.

Author: Earl Swift
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 08/18/2026
Pages: 368
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.20lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.30w x 1.28d
ISBN: 9780063265431


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 05/01/2026 pg. 123
Kirkus Reviews 07/01/2026
Booklist 08/01/2026
Publishers Weekly 08/24/2026

About the Author
Swift, Earl: - 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.