More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 1 - August 24, 2022
Katahdin Arctic butterfly
found nowhere else in the world besides the one thousand acres of tablelands on Mount Katahdin.
She calculated that she had spent about two hundred dollars on the trail, roughly ten cents a mile.
Mrs. Emma Gatewood, of Ohio, demonstrated that the hardihood of pioneer women survives today.
In 1957, she became the first person—man or woman—to walk the world’s longest trail twice.
“The forest is a quiet place and nature is beautiful. I don’t want to sit and rock. I want to do something.”
In 1958, at age seventy, she climbed six mountains in the Adirondack Range and expressed interest in joining the Forty-Sixers, a club of men who had climbed all forty-six Adirondack peaks of more than four thousand feet.
waiting in the August heat on the little old woman to walk down Sandy Boulevard, through the gold ribbon stretched across the intersection of Eighty-Second Avenue.
In ninety-five days she had walked at three miles per hour on scalding asphalt through Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho, and Oregon carrying a blue umbrella she bought for $1.50 to protect her from the sun. It had survived the entire trip in spite of the passing trucks that tried to rip it from her hands, and it came to be a symbol for guts and determination.
“I was looking for something to do this summer and a walk to Oregon seemed like the best thing.”
Emma mailed a letter to Lucy in Columbus on July 27, when she arrived in Meacham, Oregon.
told one reporter that she felt like a “sideshow freak.”
West of Meacham, near La Grande, a bevy of motorists stopped her beside the road, but as they snapped pictures and rattled off a flurry of questions, she simply walked away.
August 7, nearly two thousand miles from where she started, she walked the last short stretch into Portland at a clip that had the Centennial greeters, news reporters, and other well-wishers gasping for breath.
Grandma Gatewood Day
She was given the key to Portland.
bemoaned
“Knowing of her experience through all sections of the Trail, I asked her which part she liked best. ‘Going downhill, Sonny,’ she replied.”
What struck Gilfillan was that she was happy. The bumps and bites didn’t seem to bother her. She wore a smile and a subtle look of determination. “After the hard life I have lived,” she said, “this trail isn’t so bad.”
eighty-two, she could be found working on the trail from 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM, alone in the woods.
She added distance to her total tally until she had walked more than fourteen thousand miles, more than halfway around the earth, putting her in the slim company of astonishing pedestrians.
June 4, 1973,
Lucy Gatewood Seeds
She wears her eighty-four years well.
single, elderly woman, walking the whole thing? You can’t buy publicity like that.”
TrailJournals.com—turns up more “Grandma Gatewood” entries than you’d ever care to read.
“She lacked most of the pieces of equipment that hikers consider absolutely essential, but she possessed that one ingredient, desire, in such full measure that she never really needed the other things.”
Lucy is the keeper of the flame. She’s the youngest of Emma’s four surviving children, who have all lived good, long lives.
“Because,” she told a reporter, “I wanted to.”
GRANDMA GATEWOOD HIKE.
To be here is to participate in an experience, her experience. To walk this path that she loved is to embrace her memory, to come as close to her as possible.
Espy, Gene. The Trail of My Life.
Hare, James. Hiking the Appalachian Trail, Volume One.
