Published on July 9, 2026 06:05 am
new York Times Best-selling author Earl Swift is a legend among adventure journalists. He made his mark covering crime in the cocaine-fueled Wild West of 1980s Anchorage, Alaska. While employed at a coastal Virginia newspaper in the 1990s, he wrote an in-depth series about an Appalachian Trail thru-hike, a 435-mile canoe trip on the James River, a Chesapeake Bay circumnavigation by kayak, and more. The stories reached bylines in national outlets such as Outside, Washington PostAnd paradeand a bibliography that includes nine non-fiction books and counting.
Swift’s latest literary endeavor, a memoir titled On Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and the Search for Meaning on the Appalachian TrailFocuses on a pair of long-distance hikes done on the AT in 1990 and 2024. Like most trail tales, it details the trials, tribulations, and glories of a more than 2,000-mile hike on the spine of the planet’s oldest mountain range. But it also includes Swift’s reflections on the gruesome double murder that occurred shortly after she passed through the Thelma Marx Asylum in Pennsylvania in 1990. Swift had read and admired the trail journal entries of fellow Southbounders Geoff Hood and Molly LaRue, then befriended the pair after meeting with them on the trail. But LaRue and Hood were taking it easy, so Swift eventually moved on.
A few days later, a man suspected of murder in Florida ambushed the couple before sunrise, killing them in the shelter. A search operation began and most hikers abandoned the trail that year. Swift chose to keep going.
This purposeless tragedy “shook me to my core and made me question everything,” he says. “It haunted me for decades and I eventually returned to the trail to try to sort it out, at least partially.”
up on the cove mountain Available for preorder and will be available on August 18th. I met with Swift to talk about the book, her backpacking addiction, the value of trail narratives, and the legacy of that terrible crime. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.
How did you get interested in hiking and backpacking?
I spent most of my childhood in St. Louis and my first introduction to backpacking was through the Boy Scouts – but that was a trail of tears every time. We didn’t have the right gear and suffice to say there were a lot of problems. However, as a young person, I began to be attracted to Idea Its. Actually doing it was another matter.
Then I started working for Virginia-Pilot. This was 10 years before Bill Bryson wrote a walk in the woods; AT wasn’t even a blip on most people’s radar. I realized that Virginia is home to a quarter of the entire route and I pitched a story about hiking part of it. My editors liked the idea and sent me in 1988 to drive about 90 miles with a photographer.
We backpacked in Shenandoah National Park and tackled two-thirds of Virginia’s Triple Crown. Summiting McAfee Knob changed my life. It wasn’t a household name at the time, so you didn’t have the crowds and all the things that come with them. It was truly a spiritual experience. I looked out into the surrounding forest and realized that I was standing in a place that Native Americans believed to be a gateway between the physical and spiritual worlds. It was an awesome, magical moment. By that point, I was hooked: I knew I wanted to come back and do the whole trip.3
Tell me about your padayatra from 1990 till now. Can you discuss some of the differences, if any, in public perception of AT back then versus now? What do you think about the trail experience?
For one thing, my friends, family, and coworkers all thought I was crazy. The ferocity of his reaction stunned me—I might as well have said I was going on a trip to the moon. They could not understand the reason for this.
One of the most visible changes (since then) is the usage. In 1990 AT was a sparsely populated community. Only 130 people claimed to have completed the hike that year – and only eight of them were south-of-the-border, including me. Now they start on the same day (during bubble season). This made the experience more solitary. You might have teamed up with two or three people and walked together for several miles. But the idea of traveling in a large group or “tramile” did not exist.
The fact that there were no cell phones or trail towns as we know them increased the sense of isolation. All this means that there were days when you were truly off-grid. Now, you can hike the entire trail without that experience.
Tell me about your decision to write up on the cove mountain And try another AT trek?
I think it started when I wrote a story for Outside 2015 marks the 25th anniversary of Molly and Geoff’s deaths. What happened to him haunted and troubled me for so many years. I used to think of him whenever I stepped out on the road. I wanted to analyze my thoughts and try to write down at least some of them with my own system.
Their deaths were shattering in a way that shocked me. My reaction was completely unexpected. When I was reporting there, Anchorage had the highest murder rate in the country. The oil boom brought a flood of cash and young male workers. Everyone had guns and cocaine use was rampant. It was like Dodge City. I covered a lot of gruesome crime scenes and saw a lot of dead bodies. After a few years, I felt that my skin had grown too thick, and that I had become desensitized to the harsh realities of senseless violence. Meanwhile, I spent a lot of time in nature. I knew that nature does not want to harm or protect you. This is the water in which we swim; It doesn’t care about anything.
But Molly and Geoff’s murder upends all this. Not only were they thoughtful, extremely generous people, they were also accomplished outsiders who knew exactly what they were doing. I was impressed by his nonchalant expertise, by the complete ease with which he moved through the environment. By comparison I looked like a sticky-skinned urban slicker and would have been easy prey. If it happened to them, it could happen to me doubly easily. I kept looking for the reason.
It was the first time in my life that complete randomness was an actual working proposition for existence. My complacent notions about the world were completely shattered. It was terrifying—and it had a profound impact on my life. I wanted to clarify my thinking around all that and try to understand what it means. But as a habitual long-term journalist, an article didn’t give me the space to do that work.
By 2022, I was at a point where my professional demands were not so constant and overwhelming. I was doing a lot of walking every day and wondering if I was up to the challenge of another long hike. The structure of trail narrative seemed like an ideal medium for the kind of thinking I wanted to do and the story I wanted to tell. I hit the AT a year later.
Hiking 2,000 miles is tough at any age, but 66 is a different animal. What major differences did you experience this time?
The biggest change was an act of endurance. I was in much better condition in this padayatra than in 1990. The gear has also obviously become much lighter. This got me thinking that once I got a comfortable rhythm and my trail legs established, my average daily mileage would be higher this time. But that was not the case. Almost without fail, I would hit a wall after 14 or 15 miles. My body just said, “No, that’s it, we’re done.”
Another interesting thing was the way I faced big obstacles. I like to think that I’m a more competent and capable traveler than I was in 1990 – with far less chance of foolish risk than when I was running around like a clueless young idiot. That said, I apparently wasn’t bothered by the area at all at the time. There were places I didn’t even mention in my trail journal, which caused serious difficulty this time. For example, Goose Eye Mountain in Maine was a completely different experience. I felt like, “Hey, I could die climbing this thing.” The same was true for the rock formations on the way to Dragon’s Tooth.
Maybe it had to do with the fact that I did a lot of hiking this winter. Or perhaps it was just being more aware of what would be at stake if something went wrong. But if I’m honest, the elasticity of my joints – especially when moving downhill – and my ability to bounce back after a day of punishment weren’t what they used to be. Sleep was definitely much more important.
The trail story is not new. Why do you think readers and writers continue to find these stories attractive when they focus on the same goal and scope of land?
I think nature stories – that is, narratives highlighting humans versus the environment or an external challenge – are and always will be popular. They blur the differences between us and leave us in a helpless position before harsh forces. In those stories the adventurer is always at a disadvantage, always the underdog. And it’s fascinating.
There is no greater example than Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated 1914 trans-Arctic voyage. If that story was published in a fictional novel, no one would believe it. This is so crazy. All the best adventure stories have that quality – they can become the most improbable fantasy.
For me, I knew the writers had struck a deep chord in the Appalachian Trail. But most of those narratives are completely linear personal growth stories. They start from one end of the AT and proceed to the other end. They also keep track of the various challenges encountered along the way as well as the changes and transformations that occur in the writer. I wanted to make it a story that didn’t underline my changes. Actually, I don’t know that I’ve changed at all.
The danger, of course, is that you’re walking into well-trodden ground. But I tried to write in a way that, I hope, a wide range of people would like. I wanted there to be a how-to element, where someone who has never backpacked can understand what it means to spend so much time on the trail. I also wanted pedestrians to nod and smile along with me as I read.
Mostly, though, I just wanted to write a story that took readers on a journey. I start in the middle and end at the beginning: where Molly and Geoff’s journey ended, mine began.
