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

by Ben Montgomery

Overview

2014 National Outdoor Book Award Winner in History / Biography

Emma Gatewood told her family she was going on a walk and left her small Ohio hometown with a change of clothes and less than two hundred dollars. The next anybody heard from her, this genteel, farm-reared, sixty-seven-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. By September 1955 she stood atop Maine’s Mount Katahdin, sang “America, the Beautiful,” and proclaimed, “I said I’ll do it, and I’ve done it.”

Driven by a painful marriage, Grandma Gatewood not only hiked the trail alone, she was the first person—man or woman—to walk it twice and three times. At age seventy-one, she hiked the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail. Gatewood became a hiking celebrity, and appeared on TV with Groucho Marx and Art Linkletter. The public attention she brought to the trail was unprecedented. Her vocal criticism of the lousy, difficult stretches led to bolstered maintenance, and very likely saved the trail from extinction.

Author Ben Montgomery interviewed surviving family members and hikers Gatewood met along the trail, unearthed historic newspaper and magazine articles, and was given full access to Gatewood’s own diaries, trail journals, and correspondence. Grandma Gatewood’s Walk shines a fresh light on one of America’s most celebrated hikers. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613734995
Publisher:	Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/01/2016
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	41,531
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ben Montgomery is a staff writer at the Tampa Bay Times and cofounder of the Auburn Chautauqua, a Southern writers’ collective. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 and has won many other national writing awards. He lives in Florida.

Table of Contents

1 Pick Up Your Feet 1

2 Go Home, Grandma 13

3 Rhododendron and Rattlesnakes 31

4 Wild Dogs 45

5 How'd You Get in Here? 57

6 Our Fight 69

7 Lady Tramp 79

8 Attention 89

9 Good Hard Life 99

10 Storm 107

11 Shelter 117

12 I'll Get There 127

13 Destruction 135

14 So Much Behind 149

15 All by Myself 169

16 Return to Rainbow Lake 183

17 Aloneness More Complete than Ever 201

18 Again 209

19 Pioneer Woman 219

20 Blazing 231

21 Monuments 245

Epilogue 261

Acknowledgments 267

Bibliography 269

Index 271

Editorial Reviews

"Go, Granny, Go! . . . This astonishing tale will send you looking for your hiking boots. A wonderful story, wonderfully told.” —CHARLES MCNAIR, BOOKS EDITOR AT PASTE MAGAZINE AND AUTHOR OF PICKETT’S CHARGE


“Grandma Gatewood’s Walk is a brilliant look at an America—both good and bad—that has slipped away, seen through the eyes and feet of one of America’s
most unlikely heroines. Gatewood’s story suggests anything is possible; no matter your age, gender, or quality of your walking shoes.” —STEPHEN RODRICK, AUTHOR OF THE MAGICAL STRANGER


“Grandma Gatewood’s Walk is sure to fuel not only the dreams of would-be hikers, but debates on the limits of endurance, the power of determination, and the nature of myth.” —EARL SWIFT, AUTHOR OF THE BIG ROADS


“A quiet delight of a book.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS

From the Publisher

2014-01-16
A journalist's biography of the unassuming but gutsy 67-year-old Ohio grandmother who became the first person to walk all 2,050 miles of the Appalachian Trail three times. When Emma Gatewood (1887–1983) first decided she would hike the A.T., she told no one what she planned to do—not even her 11 children or 23 grandchildren. Instead, she quietly slipped away from her home in May 1955 and began her walk at the southern terminus of the trail in Georgia. Accomplishing this feat—which she often described as "a good lark"—was enough for her. Tampa Bay Times staff writer Montgomery tells the story of Gatewood's first hike and those that followed, interweaving the story with the heartbreaking details of her earlier life. He suggests that this woman, who eventually came to be known as "Queen of the Forest," was far from the eccentric others claimed she was. Instead, Montgomery posits that this celebrated hiker used long-distance walking to help her come to terms with a dark secret. At 18, Gatewood married a man she later discovered had a violent temper and an insatiable sexual appetite. Despite repeated beatings over 30 years, she remained with him until he nearly killed her. Afterward, she lived happily with her children for almost 20 years. Montgomery suggests that an article in National Geographic may have been what first inspired Gatewood to hike the trail. However, as her remarkable trek demonstrated, while the A.T. was as beautiful as the magazine claimed, it was also in sore need of maintenance. Gatewood's exploits, which would later include walking the Oregon Trail, not only brought national attention to the state of hikers' trails across a nation obsessed with cars and newly crisscrossed with highways; it also made Americans more aware of the joys of walking and of nature itself. A quiet delight of a book.

Kirkus Reviews