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Join us Tuesday, Oct. 13th at Pale Fire Brewing at 7pm as Earl Swift discusses Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail.Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026 at 7pm.
Live at Pale Fire Brewing Company and available later on WMRA's Youtube Channel.
Signed copies of Up on Cove Mountain will be available at the event and online at Stone Soup Books - https://www.stonesoupbooks.net
WMRA's Books & Brews is made possible thanks to our series sponsor, Gaines Group Architects. The Gaines Group has offices in Charlottesville and Harrisonburg.
About Up on Cove Mountain:
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.
He also left the AT with baggage: Early in his odyssey, he spent time with a couple of other southbounders, friendly and capable and doing everything right, who were nonetheless murdered weeks later at a mountaintop campsite in Pennsylvania—a fit of violence the killer never explained.
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?
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Event venue
Pale Fire Brewing Company, 217 S Liberty St, Harrisonburg, VA 22801-3674, United States
Tickets
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