Five million steps. Twenty-two hundred miles. A five-month, bucket-list adventure on America's most storied footpath--followed by a second hike decades later to sort out what went so terribly wrong. From the New York Times bestselling author of Chesapeake Requiem comes a haunting tale of danger, destiny, and blind luck in the wilds, and of two hikers who did not survive the journey.

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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?

     The result is an arresting account of Swift’s 2024 trek through the AT’s enduring wonders and the ghosts of its past, a chronicle of swashbuckling adventure coupled with a meditation on the nature of risk and the risks of nature.​