UP ON COVE MOUNTAIN: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail, by Earl Swift
Late one night in the summer of 1990, Earl Swift was startled awake at his campsite in the White Mountains of New Hampshire by the loudest noise he’d ever heard.
He was in his early 30s and only a few weeks into a six-month leave of absence from newspaper work, to trek a couple of thousand miles, from Maine to Georgia.
When he opened his eyes, a fallen tree branch lay inches from his head. “I was unnerved, and deeply so, that life or death could turn on such blind, stupid, unimaginable luck,” he writes in “Up on Cove Mountain.”
A pair of genial slowpokes he overtook later that week weren’t so fortunate. Molly LaRue and Geoff Hood, who charmed everyone with the obstinately upbeat messages they left scrawled in the logbooks at trail shelters, had hoped to get married upon completing the Appalachian Trail. Instead, LaRue was raped, and they were both shot dead, by a killer on the lam, in a shelter in Pennsylvania.
The culprit was not technically a hiker, but he briefly became one, commandeering his victims’ gear and continuing south, hoping to blend in among the stream of sweaty backpackers. Spooky stuff — especially at a time before cellphones and amid a trusting trail culture where people often shed their formal identities in favor of monikers like “Lone Wolf” and “Lost Boy.” (Swift went by Earl.)
Authorities posted signs to trees advising everyone to get out of the woods until the shooter was caught — which he was, more than a week later. But lasting damage had been done to the psyches of those who, like Nalgene and Clevis (as LaRue and Hood called themselves), may have believed in the trail’s simulated wilderness as a kind of sanctuary.
Swift, now a best-selling author, says that he decided to hike the trail again, in 2024, at age 66, because he wanted answers to unspecified questions about the traumatic incident that had haunted his first passage. It’s not disclosing much — other than a familiarity with the tropes of questing nonfiction — to say that he doesn’t find many.
“Statistically, violence has remained all but a stranger to the AT,” he writes. Unstable trees and rocks are a more frequent danger than unstable humans.
Which is not to say that nearly every person wearing Gore-Tex is levelheaded. Back in 1990, on the same day he met Nalgene and Clevis, Swift also shared a campsite with a man who claimed to be hiding out on the trail because his in-laws were trying to get him kidnapped by the Mob; this time, he recognizes a man cadging batteries in Vermont as the same vagrant who had stolen his map in Virginia. The thief, whom Swift calls Ralph, hadn’t struck him as a natural thru-hiker, and Swift is surprised to see how much ground he’s covered. “I was homeless,” Ralph explains. “But people kept giving me stuff, so I just kept going.”
One foot in front of the other: Just keep going. This is the great wisdom of most adventure lit, and Swift’s story is no exception. He braids his recollections of the two long treks to surprising effect, and it’s a strength, rather than a weakness, that the reader can sometimes get disoriented by the jump-cutting chronology, submitting to the delirium of the marches as if in a fugue state. As the trail’s most prominent bard, Bill Bryson, put it, “However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods.”
Or at the nearest restaurant, it turns out. Swift’s account makes clear just how much energy is required to move an adult body up and down an unending series of ridgelines, many of them subfreezing after dark. And though one of his hiking pals answers to the name Granola, Swift’s own tastes are less crunchy. Even as he nears retirement age, he eats like a teen, scarfing whole pizzas, cheese steaks, mounds of bacon and ice cream by the pint. Despite consuming 5,000 to 6,000 calories a day, his belt still requires constant tightening. Who needs Ozempic when we have the Appalachian Trail?
The differences between the two expeditions are largely inconsequential, Swift finds, in the face of the terrain’s unyielding grandeur. Apps replace maps. The gear gets lighter, the hostels more numerous. Reservations are now required at the campsites on Maine’s Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus, owing to a roughly tenfold increase in the number of seekers.
The climate, on the other hand, has grown more forbidding, with wildfires and ticks among the increasing threats. “The day is coming, and soon, when hikers will be unable to rely on natural water sources along hundreds of miles of the trail’s middle, from Connecticut into southwest Virginia,” Swift writes. “So, not to worry: It won’t get any easier.”
UP ON COVE MOUNTAIN: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail | By Earl Swift | Mariner | 368 pp. | $32
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