Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail

by Ben Montgomery

She packed her things in late spring, when her flowers were in full bloom, and left Gallia County, Ohio, the only place she’d ever really called home.

She pulled from the box a drawstring sack she’d made back home from a yard of denim, her wrinkled fingers doing the stitching, and opened it wide. She filled the sack with other items from the box: Vienna Sausage, raisins, peanuts, bouillon cubes, powdered milk. She tucked inside a tin of Band-Aids, a bottle of iodine, some bobby pins, and a jar of Vicks salve. She packed the slippers and a gingham dress that she could shake out if she ever needed to look nice. She stuffed in a warm coat, a shower curtain to keep the rain off, some drinking water, a Swiss Army knife, a flashlight, candy mints, and her pen and a little Royal Vernon Line memo book that she had bought for twenty-five cents at Murphy’s back home.

She stood, finally, her canvas Keds tied tight, on May 3, 1955, atop the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, the longest continuous footpath in the world, facing the peaks on the blue-black horizon that stretched toward heaven and unfurled before her for days. Facing a mean landscape of angry rivers and hateful rock she stood, a woman, mother of eleven and grandmother of twenty-three. She had not been able to get the trail out of her mind.

When she finally could, it was 1955, and she was sixty-seven years old.

“The Appalachian Trail, popularly the ‘A.T.,’ is a public pathway that rates as one of the seven wonders of the outdoorsman’s world,” the article gushed. “Over it you may ‘hay foot, straw foot’ from Mount Katahdin, with Canada on the horizon, to Mount Oglethorpe, which commands the distant lights of Atlanta.” The old woman had been captivated. “Planned for the enjoyment of anyone in normal good health,” it read, “the A.T. doesn’t demand special skill or training to traverse.” By the time the article was published in 1949, just one man, a twenty-nine-year-old soldier named Earl V. Shaffer, had officially reported hiking the trail’s entire length in a single, continuous journey. In the seven years since Shaffer’s celebrated hike, only five others had achieved the same. All were men. Emma intended to change that.

In 1948, Earl V. Shaffer became the first person to hike its entirety in a single trip, the first thru-hiker, and when he was finished, he wrote: “Already it seemed like a vivid dream, through sunshine, shadow, and rain—Already I knew that many times I would want to be back again—On the cloud-high hills where the whole world lies below and far away—By the wind-worn cairn where admiring eyes first welcome newborn day—To walk once more where the white clouds sail, far from the city clutter—And drink a toast to the Long High Trail in clear, cold mountain water.”

Blake noted that Emma had worn out three pairs of shoes and had lost twenty-four pounds in the three months she’d been walking. “Even the beginning of the hike was done on a spur of the moment basis. Mrs. Gatewood just started out equipped with a canteen, a 25-pound pack and some ‘spending money,’” the article read. “Mrs. Gatewood has had no special training as a hiker, except for the good hard life of raising her 11 children on a farm in Ohio.” The article spoke of her determination, and how she had established a pace of about seventeen miles per day, “rain or shine.” The shine part was easy.

The summer I turned 21, I worked for a church in East Harlem, New York, which had the highest density of population on earth at that time and a murder rate to prove it. Each square inch of concrete was fought over by gangs, with summer’s heat adding fuel to that fire. In hopes of brokering peace between the two largest rival gangs, the church I worked for had me take the four top honchos of each gang for a week-long hike along the Appalachian Trail in Vermont. None of the eight could resist the church’s invitation to take an all-expenses-paid vacation far from the heat of the city. Our first day out, we hiked 15 miles out before a hurricane unexpectedly blew inland and trapped us inside an 8 x 20 foot trailside lean-to. As night fell, Emma Gatewood, a 5’2” grandma who was living her dream of hiking the entire trail from Georgia to Maine staggered into camp. Bruised, exhausted, her gear and provisions washed away by swollen streams, she was in dire need. What made things tricky was that Emma was a genteel white Southern lady. She could hide neither her drawl nor her unease at living in close proximity to eight young black males, her distress leading all eight to bestow on her their stoniest stares. It rained and blew hard…. The brute force of nature so overwhelmed us it literally dissolved the tension in our lean-to. That hurricane, by facing us with a severe, totally mutual challenge, forced us all back to what we had in common, our humanity. Like people trapped in a lifeb...

Mary Snow’s story about Emma ran in Sports Illustrated on August 15—the day Emma would face death—under a black-and-white photograph of her on the trail. The headline was: PAT ON THE BACK. A 67-year-old great-grandmother, Mrs. Emma Gatewood of Gallipolis, Ohio, is determined to be the first woman to hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail, 2,050 miles of mountain footpath from Mt. Oglethorpe, Georgia, to Mt. Katahdin, Maine. Mrs. Gatewood, alone and without a map, began following the white blaze marks of the trail early in May, and this week from Connecticut’s Cathedral Pines, Grandmother Gatewood could look back on 1,500 miles of the best and worst of nature. She had carefully avoided disturbing three copperheads and two rattlesnakes on the trail, flipped aside one attacking rattler with a walking stick. When caught without nearby shelter she had heated some stones and slept on them to keep from freezing. For snacks Grandma nibbled wild huckleberries, young sorrel for salad and sucked bouillon cubes to combat loss of body salt. Her contacts with other humans ranged from a miserly individual who refused her even a drink, to a generous housewife who supplied fried chicken to carry on the trail. Mrs. Gatewood is serenely confident that she can finish her trek. “I’ll get there except if I break something loose. And when I get atop Mt. Katahdin, I’ll sing America, The Beautiful, ‘From sea to shining sea.’”

He got the hint, but he asked her one more question. Why are you doing this? Just for the heck of it, she said.

Below the headline was a photograph of Emma, smiling, sitting in the grass and touching a sign that said APPALACHIAN TRAIL. Below the photograph was another headline: GRANDMA WALKS APPALACHIAN TRAIL FOR “THE HECK OF IT”

Maine was rugged. Maine was wild. In forty years, Maine would still have more uninhabited forest than any other continental state.

Emma Gatewood was coy when people asked why, at her age, she had decided to strike out on the long trail. As America’s attention turned more toward Emma in her final days on the A.T., as newspaper reporters ramped up their dispatches to update the public on her condition and whereabouts, she offered an assortment of reasons about why she was walking. The kids were finally out of the house. She heard that no woman had yet thru-hiked in one direction. She liked nature. She thought it would be a lark. I want to see what’s on the other side of the hill, then what’s beyond that, she told a reporter from Ohio. Any one of the answers could stand on its own, but viewed collectively, the diversity of responses left her motivation open to interpretation, as though she wanted people to seek out their own conclusions, if there were any to be made. Maybe each answer was honest. Maybe she was trying to articulate that exploring the world was a good way to explore her own mind.

fact, the trail through Maine almost ended before it was started. By 1933, construction and linkage of the trail was under way in most areas, but not northern New England. Some thought the trail should end at New Hampshire’s Mount Washington because blazing the A.T. through Maine’s rugged wilderness would make it difficult to access and maintain. After a two-year study, a proposed route for the trail appeared in a 1933 issue of In the Maine Woods, and Myron Avery began convincing volunteers and the Civilian Conservation Corps to help. They measured the trail, built campsites, and drew maps. However, much of their work was done hastily in an effort to extend the trail through to Katahdin. In August 1937, the final section was completed on the north slope of Spaulding Mountain, but the problem of maintenance would persist. Through the 1940s, hurricane blowdowns and new logging operations caused the trail to fall into disrepair. Many of the trail volunteers were sent off to war, so it stayed in bad shape until the 1950s, when efforts to restore the path began anew.

FARMINGTON, Maine (UP)—A 67-year-old grandmother from Gallipolis, Ohio neared the end of a [2,050] mile hike on the Appalachian Trail today. Mrs. Emma Gatewood, the hiker, is within 110 miles of her destination—Mt. Katahdin, Maine. She expects to reach the mountain in a fortnight. Mrs. Gatewood, a sturdy five feet, four inches, started from Oglethorpe, Ga., on the Appalachian Trail last May 2. Mt. Katahdin is the end of the trail. Mrs. Gatewood carries a light shoulder pack with a raincoat, blanket and enough food to last her between stopovers. She walks only about eight miles a day now because of a lame leg. Why the long walk? Mrs. Gatewood, who has 11 children, 23 grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren, put it this way: “After 20 years of hanging diapers and seeing my children grow up and go their own way, I decided to take a walk—one I always wanted to take.”

read about this trail three years ago in a magazine and the article told about the beautiful trail, how well marked it was, that it was cleared out and that there were shelters at the end of a good day’s hike, Emma said. I thought it would be a nice lark. It wasn’t. There were terrible blowdowns, burnt-over areas that were never re-marked, gravel and sand washouts, weeds and brush to your neck, and most of the shelters were blown down, burned down, or so filthy I chose to sleep out of doors. This is no trail. This is a nightmare. For some fool reason they always lead you right up over the biggest rock to the top of the biggest mountain they can find. I’ve seen every fire station between here and Georgia. Why, an Indian would die laughing his head off if he saw those trails. I would never have started this trip if I had known how tough it was, but I couldn’t and wouldn’t quit.

Even though the A.T. has become better maintained and more crowded over the years, finishing a thru-hike remains a remarkable achievement. More than eleven thousand people have hiked all two-thousand-plus miles, many in sections. But among thru-hikers, on average, three out of four who start never finish, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. The number of two-thousand-milers, as they’re called, has been on the rise in recent years, growing from 562 in 2005 to 704 in 2011. Those numbers would have seemed preposterous to the trail’s planners and early organizers. In the 1930s, just five people reported hiking the entire trail, all of them in sections. (The trail was completed in 1937.) Only three finished in the 1940s—Earl Shaffer was the lone thru-hiker—a period during which the trail was again incomplete or unconnected in places. In the 1950s, when Emma came along, just fourteen reported two-thousand-mile hikes.

Mrs. Emma Gatewood, a resident of Gallipolis, Ohio, in our congressional district, won for herself national fame a few months ago. In spite of the fact that she was 67 years old and a great-grandmother, she hiked by herself 2,050 miles over rugged mountainous course. She hiked the rough and rugged Appalachian Trail from Fort Oglethorpe, Ga., to the summit of mile-high Mount Katahdin in wild and rugged northeastern Maine. In performing this great undertaking, she wore out seven pairs of shoes. She carried only a blanket and a small supply of rations. She reached this wild and rugged goal after walking for 146 days. She averaged 17 miles a day and lost 24 pounds of weight. Her accomplishment brought forth many comments from mountain people. One old and experienced Maine woodsman said of her, “We have got to hand it to her. It takes guts, pioneer guts, to do that kind of a job.” Mrs. Gatewood read about the trail 3 years ago—how well marked it was, that there were shelters at the end of a day’s hike—but she found most of the shelters had been blown down or burned. Much of the time she slept on benches, tables, and on the ground. On bitter cold nights she would heat stones to sleep on. In places the trail was little more than a path. There were sand and gravel washouts, weeds and brush up to her neck. But she would not quit. She inched her way over great ledges of shelf rock made slick with sleet, waded across 30-foot-wide mountain streams, whacked with her cane at dense under...

This is the amazing reality of Grandma Gatewood’s legacy. Somehow her story became a motivating tale for those who came in contact with it, man or woman, regardless of generation. Her hikes brought attention to the trail like none before.

Among those who study the trail, those who know its history inside and out, her legacy is indelible. “She drew a lot of attention to the Appalachian Trail,” said Larry Luxenberg, author of Walking the Appalachian Trail. “Her hikes inspired a lot of people. No matter how bad your hike is, how difficult the trail is, you could always point to Grandma Gatewood and say, ‘Well, she did it.’”