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

by Ben Montgomery

Leonardo da Vinci designed elevated streets to protect walkers from cart traffic.

The water pouring in from a big hole in the roof made a decent stream in which she washed her clothes.

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.

Park rangers here at Baxter were shocked when, in the mid 1990s, federal agents raided the homes of a pest exterminator and two businessmen in California and Arizona and found thirty-seven Katahdin Arctic butterflies among a collection of twenty-two hundred rare insects. Their audacious poaching operation—agents found letters from one man advising the others to, if caught, say, “Sorry, I didn’t know you couldn’t catch butterflies here”—sparked the first federal case against butterfly poaching

Farther west, outside The Dalles, she threw stones at a pesky newsman.