Earl Swift and Dan Rodricks: UP ON COVE MOUNTAIN: ADVENTURE, TRAGEDY, AND A QUEST FOR MEANING ON THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL

About this event

You might know longtime journalist Earl Swift from his wonderful book Chesapeake Requiem, one of the bestselling books in the Regional section of our bookshop. Now, Earl Swift returns with a poignant and thoughtful new volume on the nature of risk and the risks of nature: Up on Cove Mountain. Join us at The Ivy as Earl Swift and fellow journalist Dan Rodricks, discuss the heart of this book, which chronicles Swift’s 2024 trek through the Appalachian Trail – and reckons with a horrible fact: Early in his odyssey, Swift 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. As he traces his return to the trail– and to this memory– half a lifetime later, he invites us to join him in contemplation and commemoration. RSVP here! Order UP ON COVE MOUNTAIN here! Longtime journalist Earl Swift is the author of ten critically acclaimed books and hundreds of major features for newspapers and magazines. His latest book, Up on Cove Mountain, is the product of his two end-to-end hikes on the Appalachian Trail, thirty-four years apart. While chasing stories over a nearly fifty-year career, Swift has also camped for weeks in the Laotian jungle, excavated a crashed World War II bomber in Papua New Guinea, made numerous tailhook landings on aircraft carriers, and waded alongside six-foot catfish in the sewers of St. Louis. He was a Fulbright fellow to New Zealand in 1994, and spent ten years as a Virginia Humanities fellow at the University of Virginia. He lives in the Blue Ridge mountains west of Charlottesville. Three times a week from January 1979 until January 2025, Dan Rodricks wrote a column on a sprawling range of topics for The Baltimore Sun. At 46 consecutive years, it was believed to be the longest-running local column in the U.S. Before resigning from The Sun in January 2025, he…

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