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

<p><b>From the <i>New York Times</i> bestselling author of <i>Chesapeake Requiem</i> 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.</b></p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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?</p><p><i>Up on Cove Mountain</i> 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.</p>

• Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail, (Audiobook)
• Author: HarperCollins
• ISBN: 9798228975415
• Format: Audiobook
• Publication Date: 2026-08-18
• Page Count: 0