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.

​

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.​