Reviews for Up on Cove Mountain : Adventure, tragedy, and a quest for meaning on the Appalachian Trail
Library Journal
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This memoir combines the author's recollections of hiking the Appalachian Trail twice (once at 31 and again in his mid-60s) with fragments of detail about two fellow hikers murdered on the trail in 1990. Swift (Hell Put to Shame) had briefly hiked with the victims before moving on. Within a week of parting ways, he heard they had been brutally murdered in a trail shelter by a drifter wanted for a previous murder in Florida. Violence on the trail is relatively rare, so the news shocked the hiking community. Thirty-five years later, the young couple still haunts Swift as he revisits the trails he once hiked. His book also serves as a guide to the trail, with all its challenges, as well as to the equipment and techniques a hiker may need to know. Swift is an experienced hiker, but he does notice the challenges the years have brought to his body. For readers who would like to hike the trail, this book provides useful information. For those who want to simply vicariously experience the trail, this is the perfect volume. VERDICT This book's vivid writing style brings readers inside the hiking experience.—Caren Nichter
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Rehiking an iconic wilderness trail after decades, haunted by memories of a horrific crime. Swift first hiked the whole Appalachian Trail in the summer of 1990, the same summer a couple he’d met and passed along the way encountered a brutal drifter at a remote shelter near Duncannon, Pennsylvania. The rape and double murder of Molly LaRue and Geoffrey Hood was one of the few times when violent crime visited the trail. Hikers are much more likely to be confronted by natural threats, like bears, snakes, bad weather, and deadly missteps, than by human predators. Swift, like so many other “thru-hikers” that summer—heading from the trail’s northernmost point in Maine to the southern endpoint in Georgia—was charmed by the couple’s cheerful notes in the registers hikers use to communicate with each other along the way. He eventually had the pleasure of hiking and camping with them, so the news of their murders hit hard. The crime is just one thread in Swift’s narrative and not the main story, which focuses on a second thru-hike that he undertook at age 66. Each piece, equally well told, can feel as if they come from different books, and—true crime aficionados take note—the true crime portions develop in small bursts out of long, present-tense passages about Swift’s late-in-life hike. The ideal reader is one who appreciates thoughtful, well-crafted prose by a sensitive, knowledgeable, mildly cantankerous writer on an adventure that readers might imagine undertaking themselves. “Lying in the dark, I feel an upswelling love for the Appalachian Trail,” Swift summarizes as his adventure ends. “For all my complaints and discomforts, for all the fears and anxieties I’ve endured at various points of the journey, I remain awed by this epic resource.” An elegiac memoir of growth through self-challenge. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
While Swift’s early grumblings over his 1990 conquest of the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail—“I was hurting from the first minute, and kept hurting through every minute after”—might not spur readers to join him on the repeat, 2023 journey he chronicles here, it turns out he’s a superb travel companion from start to finish. He’s keenly observant of changing landscapes and weather, openhearted to the myriad hikers he encounters, a fine raconteur, actually uncomplaining of his injuries except to share the demands and natural perils of the trail, and, now in his mid-60s, a man filled with gratitude and wonder at the treasures before him. A counter-narrative of the senseless murders of two AT hikers the author met during his 1990 trek emphasizes the tight-knit, mutually supportive community of hikers, trail maintainers, hostel managers, and other angels, cited in full here, who make the Appalachian Trail the life-altering experience it is for its travelers. It remains, as Swift writes, “central to who I think I am.” And, quoting the mantra of many of its hikers, “The trail provides.”
Publishers Weekly
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In this contemplative account, Swift (Hell Put to Shame) parallels his two journeys along the Appalachian Trail with that of a young couple who never made it to the end. In 1990, a 32-year-old Swift embarked on his first thru-hike of the 2,200 mile trail stretching from Maine to Georgia. Early on, he met fellow hikers Molly LaRue and Geoff Hood. Shortly after he parted ways with them, LaRue and Hood were murdered in Pennsylvania, a random crime that sent shock waves through the trail community. Thirty-four years later, Swift set off on the Appalachian Trail again, musing that “another walk might answer questions I don’t even know how to ask.” Though LaRue and Hood’s deaths haunt the narrative, Swift spends most of his time meticulously recounting the shelters, views, and streams he encountered on his hikes. As a result, readers receive a thorough portrait of the “trail towns” dotted along the route and gain insight into esoteric hiker etiquette (“ ‘Hiker Midnight’ denotes the start of quiet time in camp”). Such dense detail risks becoming monotonous, but Swift sustains narrative momentum with shrewd cuts between timelines. The result is a moody meditation on humans’ relationship with nature and the passage of time. Agent: David Black, David Black Literary. (Aug.)
