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

by Montgomery, Ben

  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 underbrush. She is not afraid of forest animals, although a rattlesnake struck but just got her dungarees.

  Mrs. Gatewood is the only woman who ever accomplished this feat. At the top of Mount Katahdin she signed the register and sang “America the Beautiful.” In her own words, she was—

  Just walking the trail for pleasure

  For the love of out of doors,

  For the lovely works our Maker

  Displays on forest floors.

  In an editorial, the Boston Post states that Mrs. Emma Gatewood, of Ohio, demonstrated that the hardihood of pioneer women survives today.

  The Millinocket, Maine, Chamber of Commerce presented her with a framed picture of Mount Katahdin when she was its guest. She was also awarded a trophy and a life membership in the National Hikers and Campers Association.

  Mrs. Gatewood is a relative of O. O. McIntyre, famed New York columnist, whose syndicated columns covering the United States helped make the city of Gallipolis, Ohio, famous.

  By the wonderful performance, Mrs. Emma Gatewood has achieved for herself a place with the heroes of the country.

  18

  AGAIN

  1957

  On April 12, when she was all alone at home, Emma Gatewood quietly sewed a new bag out of a yard of denim—large enough to carry a few items of clothing, gear, first-aid supplies, and food.

  On April 16, she babysat her grandchildren, and they did not behave, and she wrote in her diary, “I will be glad when I can get away.”

  On April 22, she bought a Timex wristwatch for fourteen dollars and watched a man in the bus station take the screws out of the hinges on a telephone booth with a coin and then walk away.

  On April 24, she went to Mrs. Church’s house and sat on the porch for a while with Lannie Thompson’s little girl, then caught a ride with Ms. JaQuay to Northup, then down the road and past the old family homestead, high on the hill, then on up Raccoon Creek to Edith’s place. On the way back, she went to Dr. Allison’s to get her false teeth, which were ready for pickup, and to Dr. Thomas’s to get a screw for her glasses. Then she packed her suitcase, grabbed her coat, and went up to Monroe’s for the night so she could leave bright and early to catch the bus to Charleston, then the plane to Atlanta, then the bus to Jasper, then the taxi to Mount Oglethorpe.

  It had been nineteen months since she stood on Mount Katahdin. She’d had two birthday parties and thousands of those little moments that make a civilized, nice, normal life, of rhubarb pie and dirty dishes, of pot roast and burping babies.

  Now, two weeks before Mother’s Day 1957, six months before her seventieth birthday, the Appalachian Trail was calling her back.

  In May 1957, a journalist named Murray T. Pringle wrote a story for American Mercury called “Tried Walking Lately,” which pointed out that Americans had become irreversibly dependent on the automobile. “No American generation has walked less than the present one, or has paid less heed to Thomas Jefferson’s dictum that ‘Of all exercises, walking is the best.’”

  The card arrived at Lucy’s house in Columbus, Ohio, postmarked CARATUNK, MAINE.

  Sept. 7, 57

  Dear Lucy, Louise, et al,

  There was a reception of about twenty met me at the river yesterday evening. Two reporters, four forest wardens and others. I think I will be through in ten days. I have taken so much time off to visit or could have been done. I am fine and having the time of my young life. Hoping all is fine with you. I am, with love, Mamma.

  MOUNT KATAHDIN, ME, SEPT. 16 - (AP) - Mrs. Emma Gatewood, a 69-year-old grandmother from Gallipolis, Ohio will climb Mt. Katahdin’s 5267-foot peak today after completing her 2026-mile hike along the Appalachian Trail.

  It was the second trip along the trail for Mrs. Gatewood. She is the first woman to have completed the journey in its entirety in one season. She started the trip from Mt. Oglethorpe, Ga., April 27, and arrived here yesterday.

  They called her “Queen of the Forest.”

  In 1955, she was the first woman to thru-hike alone. In 1957, she became the first person—man or woman—to walk the world’s longest trail twice. She reached the Katahdin summit nearly blind because her glasses kept fogging over during the climb, so she simply took them off. “I could not see,” she wrote in her diary. “It made me plenty nervous getting down over all those rocks, but I slowly made it without accident.”

  She descended the mountain with a spate of new stories. “Gettin’ too old,” she told a reporter at the bottom of the mountain. “There were places where I had to pull myself over sheer rocks and I’m afraid I’ll get to the age where I won’t be able to do that anymore.”

  She had walked within six feet of a rattlesnake in May, in the Georgia foothills. She backed away, waited ten minutes for the snake to move, then cut around through the woods, leaving the “sassy thing” rattling.

  About her lack of nourishment a few days later, she wrote, “I was so tired and my knees felt weak from lack of food, I wobbled when I walked.” At her weakest, she approached an unpainted shack to ask for food. Dogs ran out barking and a man with a peg leg appeared on the porch. The place looked so poor that she did not expect to find a meal, but the peg-legged man had heard about Emma’s hiking and sent her away with boiled eggs, corn pone, stewed beef, an onion, and a can of condensed milk.

  An old mutt followed her from Tennessee to Virginia and into a store, where she bought new shoes and left her old high tops—and the dog.

  On June 14, she saw her first bear, coming down the trail. She shouted, “Hey!” and the bear loped off.

  She was bitten by something—she didn’t know what—near Roanoke and her leg swelled to the knee. It grew so bad that she begged a ride to the doctor. She didn’t tell him who she was or what she was doing for fear he’d try to stop her. He gave her penicillin, the first she’d ever had, and also some pink pills he did not identify. She spent the rest of the day on the couch of a stranger who waited on her as though she were an invalid. Her foot ached for days and made walking painful.

  On June 27, she walked through Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. “No one recognized me,” she wrote in her journal. “Still think I am a tramp.”

  She spent a solid July day in Pennsylvania not talking to Dorothy Laker, who would become the second woman to thru-hike by herself. “I started before five, but it was not long until [Laker] passed me. I did not talk to her. Then I passed her, on and off, all day, but never saying a word to each other.” Laker, in her own account of the day, doesn’t mention Emma at all. It’s hard to know why the two didn’t speak. Competition, maybe?

 
In August, Emma walked up on a shelter occupied by Boy Scouts and saw their leader sitting outside in his “birthday clothes.”

  On the best nights, she was greeted warmly by friends she had made two years before and slept on comfortable mattresses in climate-controlled houses. On unlucky nights, she found shelter beside ant-infested logs, or on piles of leaves or grass, or, on one rainy evening, inside a large pasteboard box that surprisingly kept her fairly dry. She slept under the trailer of a long-haul eighteen-wheeler, and in the posh Bear Mountain Inn, and at the Laurel Ridge Tourist Home, where, she wrote, “There was so much noise all night by giggling girls and indecent sounds I did not sleep much. I would liked to have thrown a lot of things down stairs.”

  She even made her bed one night in the amen corner of an abandoned country church.

  In New York, she witnessed an AWOL soldier turn himself in to the state police. In Connecticut, she rode in a parade onboard a fire engine with the volunteer fire department. In several towns where word of her travels arrived early, folks hosted welcoming parties that made Emma feel special. One woman, upon recognizing her, gave Emma a kiss that could be heard around the block.

  On the path, the beauty of nature fulfilled her. She gazed at a mountainside violet with a purple tip, like an orchid. She watched a wood-pewee feed her babies in a nest in the corner of a lean-to. A wild turkey crossed her path. She was resting one afternoon on a thick, moss-covered log, daydreaming, when a red fox came jogging down the path, carrying small prey in its mouth, oblivious to the old woman lying on the log. She watched it come near, then asked, “Are you bringing me my dinner?” The fox shot through the forest like a red streak.

  She hadn’t kept this hike a secret like she had the last. She sent postcards home from Clingmans Dome, in Tennessee.

  “She was sending cards to all of us, at different times and from different places,” Nelson told me. “She was hiking fourteen miles a day, so we intercepted her. We went up east of Harrisburg, to Lehigh Gap, Pennsylvania, and here she came. We took her to dinner there, and the next morning we hiked up the rock formation called Devil’s Pulpit. She was having a good time. She just talked about the trail, told us about things she had run across. Told us about the bear.”

  She met reporters, too, nearly everywhere she went. Even more so than the first trip, this journey was well-documented in American newspapers, magazines, and on television.

  “Some people think it’s crazy,” she told one reporter. “But I find a restfulness—something that satisfies my type of nature. The woods make me feel more contented.”

  “What made you do all this?” a reporter asked.

  “The forest is a quiet place and nature is beautiful. I don’t want to sit and rock. I want to do something.”

  She told them she found the trail in better condition that year. Her initial criticism had prompted hiking clubs to clean and mark parts of the trail. That was also part of the reason she finished the hike in fewer days.

  Before she left Millinocket, the chamber of commerce presented her with a blue and gray suit. She spoke to the students and teachers at the local high school. She spent part of one day baking special cookies, then delivered them to patients at the Millinocket Community Hospital.

  Back home in Gallia County, she was the talk of the town. The Blue Devil marching band played theme music to honor her at a Friday night football game. The chamber of commerce presented her a plaque at halftime and declared it “Grandma Gatewood Night.”

  “I’d like to go to the South Pole,” she told a group of Gallipolis Rotarians who invited her to speak, “but nobody’ll take me there. There’s no need for old ladies at the South Pole. I guess they have their own cooks.”

  The Queen of the Forest posed with politicians and told her story at school assemblies. She addressed the Palmerton Over 60 Club and the League of Ohio Sportsmen and welcomed even more reporters to sit and chat.

  “Mrs. Gatewood possesses a wonderful sense of humor,” one wrote. “She reports having had a good laugh all by herself near the beginning of her hike. She had lain down to rest under a tree and after a bit, quite unconsciously moved her arm and frightened away a buzzard that was about to light. She thought to herself, ‘I’m not ready to have my bones picked yet.’”

  With the second A.T. hike complete, she began striking out elsewhere. She spent eight days and nights on the Baker Trail in Pennsylvania, and when she stopped in Aspinwall on the Allegheny River, she spent three weeks at the Redwing Girl Scout camp, chopping trees, setting up tents, and preparing the camp for winter. She was invited to a weeklong retreat at Canter’s Cave 4-H camp in Ohio, forty-three miles from her home. She walked there.

  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. Occasionally she’d ask a young relative or friend to accompany her, but she was careful not to bend societal norms. When an older man asked to join her on an extended hike, she declined. People would talk, she said. She had become an evangelist for walking, for experiencing nature, at a time when pedestrianism in America was in steep decline. She wrote of its benefits often in flowery poems.

  “The Reward of Nature”

  If you’ll go with me to the mountains

  And sleep on the leaf carpeted floors

  And enjoy the bigness of nature

  And the beauty of all out-of-doors,

  You’ll find your troubles all fading

  And feel the Creator was not man

  That made lovely mountains and forests

  Which only a Supreme Power can.

  When we trust in the Power above

  And with the realm of nature hold fast,

  We will have a jewel of great price

  To brighten our lives till the last.

  For the love of nature is healing,

  If we will only give it a try

  And our reward will be forthcoming,

  If we go deeper than what meets the eye.

  She didn’t reveal her plans for the next big hike, but soon enough everyone would know.

  Sitting beside Sunfish Lake, New Jersey, near the Delaware Water Gap, age sixty-nine, 1958. Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds

  19

  PIONEER WOMAN

  1959

  The streets of Portland were packed. Traffic was backed up in all directions. There was a maelstrom of cars, horses, dogs, bicycles, and people, some five thousand of them, many with white hair, 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.

  A cheer went up when Emma Gatewood came into view. She was flanked by several hundred elderly citizens, some of them clad in pioneer-era clothing, who had hiked the last few miles with her.

  The seventy-one-year-old woman looked tired. Spent. Her skin was leathery and tanned to a deep bronze. The soles of her shoes were worn thin. She seemed ready to collapse.

  The press had been speculating for days that she wouldn’t make it to her goal. A rumor spread that she had accepted a ride, and this became a sign that she might abandon her walk short of her destination.

  GRANDMA’S TRAIL-WEARY, proclaimed the Miami News.

  RIDE, REST HINT WALK MIGHT END, read the headline in the Spokane Daily Chronicle.

  WALKING GRANDMA MAY GIVE UP GOAL, shouted the Toledo Blade.

  Indeed, it had been a grueling trip. This wasn’t the Appalachian Trail, with its shade trees and beautiful vistas and cold-water springs. Those were scarce between Independence, Missouri, and Portland, Oregon. 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 deter
mination.

  She did her best to stick to the Old Oregon Trail, which was blazed by trappers and traders and pioneers in the early 1800s and served as the main route for a half million settlers seeking a better life in the West. In Vale, Oregon, she even took time to visit the grave of John D. Henderson, an immigrant who died of thirst, or maybe the black measles, in 1852, in the desert between the Malheur River and Snake River. The story has it that his team died not long into the trip from Independence. Henderson decided to continue on foot, but he couldn’t make it. A blacksmith chiseled his name into stone and pressed on.

  The idea to walk the trail had come to her while reading about the Oregon Centennial Exposition. She had spent a chunk of 1958 hiking other pieces of the Appalachian Trail, intending to string together a third two-thousand-mile hike in sections. She had walked from Duncannon, Pennsylvania, to North Adams, Massachusetts. A hike west was indeed a change of scenery.

  “I read a piece in the newspapers about that wagon train going to Oregon [in conjunction with the exposition], and I thought of all the women who walked behind the wagons when they went to settle the country,” she told a reporter in Junction City, Kansas. “I was looking for something to do this summer and a walk to Oregon seemed like the best thing.”

  She left Independence, Missouri, on May 4, two weeks after former president Harry Truman waved good-bye to the seven-wagon train, and plodded through the plains. She sent a postcard home from Denver, Colorado, on June 3, saying that the snow on the mountains was beautiful and that the governor of Oregon had made her a goodwill ambassador at large and that she was staying with some folks who stopped her on the road. “I am fine,” she wrote. She passed the wagon train a month later, in Pocatello, Idaho, but the journey had been difficult. She slept outdoors in the Wyoming sagebrush on fourteen nights.

  The newspapers called her “America’s most celebrated pedestrian” and printed updates along the way, and again people across the country started pulling for the grandma who wouldn’t stop walking.