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

by Montgomery, Ben

  Altogether I have hiked about 700 miles this year and wore out two pairs of tennis shoes. I cannot see that the trip hurt me any. I am now seventy-two years old and able to do a lot more hiking.

  In 1960, as Emma Gatewood covered the country by boat and plane and mostly on her own two feet, something strange was happening. That April, two British paratroopers—Sgt. Patrick Maloney, thirty-four, and Sgt. Mervyn Evans, thirty-three—left San Francisco on a walk to New York. They aimed to make the trip in seventy days in an attempt to break the cross-country record of seventy-nine days, which had stood since 1926.

  This was not long after J. M. Flagler, writing for the New Yorker, bemoaned the loss of long-walker Edward Weston and American pedestrians of his day. “Nowadays,” he wrote, “distance, endurance, and speed walking are all but lost arts in America.”

  The pedestrian headlines were back, and the paratroopers weren’t the only ones making them. Walking behind the two soldiers was Dr. Barbara Moore, a British vegetarian who embarked on the 3,250-mile walk to show that her diet of fruits, vegetables, and grass juice were better for endurance than an American diet of meat and coffee. The doctor claimed that she had cured herself of leukemia with an experimental diet. She said she planned to have a baby at age 100, and live to be 150.

  Somewhere along the route, the vegetarian, who was accompanied most of the way by a supply-laden car, vowed to beat the paratroopers to New York. She passed them at least once out West, as they slept, but the men, who swore they weren’t racing, soon pulled ahead. They gained a larger lead when Moore was struck by a car and hospitalized in Brazil, Indiana.

  By the time the paratroopers made it to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the vegetarian was lobbing accusations that they had cheated by hitching rides. She told reporters she had affidavits stating they had caught rides for nearly a third of the way. The two men finished in sixty-six days, shattering the record. Moore limped into Times Square and into throngs of onlookers after a rough eighty-five days of walking, complaining that the paratroopers had taken an easier route.

  Emma knew about the paratroopers and told a reporter that she’d like to meet them. What about Moore? “Some people think I ought to make it a point to see her,” Emma said, “but I don’t think we’d agree on anything.”

  Something new was afoot, though. Newsweek sniffed it out the same year. A fad was sweeping the United Kingdom: distance walking. It wasn’t just the vegetarian and the paratroopers. One man had walked 110 miles from Norwich to London in thirty hours. After that, 250 women representing armed forces auxiliaries walked from Birmingham to London. A chronometer factory owner in Saint Albans who thought kids were sissies challenged his four hundred male employees to walk fifty miles in fifteen hours. Thirty-two tried, and sixteen finished.

  The United States was a little slow to catch on, but by 1963, distance walking was taking the country by storm. “The Marines are marching. Girls are marching. Practically everyone is marching,” wrote the Associated Press in February. The hoopla began when Marine Commandant Gen. David M. Shoup unearthed a long-forgotten executive order from President Theodore Roosevelt that prescribed fitness standards for marines. In 1908, Roosevelt felt the marines should be in good enough shape to walk fifty miles in three days, with a total of twenty hours’ rest. Shoup sent the document to President John F. Kennedy as a historic courtesy. Kennedy wondered whether modern marines could pass the test, and in a matter of hours, marine headquarters issued a directive ordering a test by officers of the 2nd Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Kennedy casually noted in a letter to Shoup that Roosevelt “laid down such requirements not only for the officers of the Marine Corps but, when possible, for members of his own family, members of his staff and cabinet, and even for unlucky foreign diplomats who were dragooned into hiking with him through Washington’s Rock Creek Park.” Furthermore, he wrote, if the test indicates “that the strength and stamina of the modern Marine is at least equivalent to that of his antecedents, I will then ask Mr. Salinger to look into the matter personally and give me a report on the fitness of the White House staff.”

  As soon as word of the challenge got out, people across the country, strangely, started walking, aiming at fifty miles. Boy Scouts hiked in Illinois. Secretaries sauntered in Washington, DC. Students at Stanford University set out. Politicians looking for headlines took off with reporters trailing them. Four hundred high school kids in Marion County, California, tried for fifty miles and ninety-seven of them finished, including nineteen girls. Attorney General Robert Kennedy finished fifty miles in seventeen hours and fifty minutes.

  “Heel blisters became the hash-marks of the New Frontier,” reported the United Press.

  “Walking, an almost forgotten art in this motor-made nation, suddenly became as important as goldfish swallowing once was,” read an Associated Press dispatch.

  “The big surprise was the reaction in the infinitely mysterious chemistry of the American people,” said a story in Newsweek. “Citizens of all ages and conditions, mostly flabby, went after the 50-mile mark in one of the woolliest of pursuits since men first chased wild geese.”

  In May 1963, a man named Paris Whitehead was walking along the trail in Shenandoah National Park when he looked up and saw an elderly woman walking toward him. She wore a hat, tennis shoes, and a plastic raincoat. She was carrying a bundle. She was so wild looking that he knew exactly who she was. Queen of the Appalachian Trail, Grandma Gatewood. He had heard all about her. He knew she had walked the trail twice and had slept in more homes than George Washington. He’d later tell a friend about the experience, and Ronald Strickland would write of the encounter in his book, Pathfinder: “Knowing of her experience through all sections of the Trail, I asked her which part she liked best. ‘Going downhill, Sonny,’ she replied.”

  Late in the summer of 1964, Merrill C. Gilfillan, an Ohio conservationist who was doing a feature story for Columbus Dispatch Magazine showed up at the Pinkham Notch Hut south of Gorham, New Hampshire. He had arranged to meet up there with Emma Gatewood, who was trying to finish hiking the Appalachian Trail for the third time. When she didn’t show the first day, he was mildly concerned. His worry grew on the second day as temperatures in the valleys of the Presidential Range dropped below thirty degrees. The third day brought snow above the timberline and winds of fifty to sixty miles per hour. By the fourth day, he was truly alarmed. He spoke to the director of the Appalachian Mountain Club hut system, who began a radio check of the huts in an effort to find Grandma. He tried several times but couldn’t track her down. The director felt it was time to ask for a search. He was just about to call the US Forest Service when he found her, at Mizpah Spring Shelter, a few miles above Crawford Notch. They’d meet soon.

  While Gilfillan waited on her to arrive, he watched as hundreds of hikers came and went. The hut master said some two hundred a day passed through. Most were college age, wearing the newest clothes and carrying the best backpacks and gear.

  The contrast was remarkable as Emma appeared out of the spruce and walked through the rain, wearing a sheepskin vest and serviceable gloves she’d found on the trail, and carrying her sack over her shoulder. She was recognized by the younger hikers coming through. They flocked around her, asking questions about the trail, showing honest admiration.

  She was damaged, though. She had fallen her first day out and hurt her knee. The injury slowed her so much she couldn’t make it to shelter and slept outdoors that night. A few days later, she was attacked by a German shepherd, which bit her on the leg before she could drive it away with her stick. She still had a nasty wound.

  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.”

  On September 17, 1964, having traversed again one of the most difficult A.T. stretches, through Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine; having survived the fin
al day of walking on bullion cubes and a handful of peanuts; Emma Gatewood, seventy-seven, reached Rainbow Lake, a fitting place to complete her third hike, since she had walked there from Mount Katahdin ten years before, in 1954.

  She was the first person to walk the entire trail three times.

  The newspapers called her “the female hiking champion of the United States—maybe of the world” and “the famed hiker from Ohio” and “the nation’s most famous woman hiker” and “a living legend among hikers.” As was customary, she offered criticism, saying that the trail was bad in a few spots—but fewer than the last time she’d been through.

  Asked why she liked to hike, she told reporters, “I took it up as kind of a lark.”

  She sold her house and used the money to buy a small trailer court back in the Gallia County town of Cheshire. The upkeep on the place was hard. Tenants left trash and rags and bottles outside, so she’d clean up and trim around the skirts with a butcher knife while they were away. When her gas mower broke down, she cut the grass with a push mower. She quilted and braided rugs and wrote letters and spoke at school assemblies and washed the windows at the Methodist church.

  She captured in her diary the extraordinary minutiae of her twilight.

  May 19, 1967.

  I took a mattock and shovel and worked on the road around the court; dug a ditch to let the water out, and dug the high places into the holes. Lifted the grass around where the well was dug and wheeled five loads of dirt and filled in. Then put the sod back and watered it and beat it down with the shovel. Put the block of walk back in place. Spaded and planted two hills of cukes, two of pumpkins, four hills of peanuts. Put a fence around to keep the rabbits out. Burned the trash. Got some asparagus down the track and picked lettuce and a few strawberries. Went to the P.O. Fixed the underpinning. And I’m tired.

  She continued to travel, especially to annual conventions of the National Campers and Hikers Association, which sometimes drew ten thousand outdoorsmen, and she was routinely singled out by the press.

  “People just can’t believe an old woman is hiking,” she told a reporter at the Salina Journal at a meeting in Kansas. “No one would do a thing like that, they figure, unless she was getting paid for it. It’s a funny thing. I work like a horse around the trailer court. But when I say I’m taking a hike, they say I shouldn’t because I’m too old. I got up on the roof awhile back and sawed off a tree limb. But no one said anything about that.”

  Back home, she began marking and blazing a hiking trail through Gallia County with the idea it would one day be connected to the Buckeye Trail, proposed to run between Cincinnati and Lake Erie. She scouted and cleared some thirty miles along the Ohio River, painting trees with robin’s egg-blue blazes, two inches wide by six inches long. She negotiated with farmers for permission to cross their private property and built stiles out of logs and rock for climbing barbed-wire fences. At eighty-two, she could be found working on the trail from 7:00 AM to 6:00 PM, alone in the woods. “They said I was too old when I tried to get a job,” she told a local reporter. “Why, I’ve done more since I was ‘too old’ than most young women.”

  At a meeting of the National Campers and Hikers Association, 1965. Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds

  Cincinnati, 1971. Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds

  For her work, Ohio Gov. James Rhodes gave her the State Conservation Award at the Ohio Achievement Day celebration at the fairgrounds in Columbus. She then flew to Fontana Dam, North Carolina, where she was a special guest at Fall Colors Hiking Week.

  Even with all the attention and honors, she continued to find peace in nature all by herself. She would stalk the countryside in search of rare flowers or a dogwood in full bloom. “I went to the hills today, looking for wild crabapples,” she wrote to her daughter. “I found trailing arbutus all over the place, and a deep wooded gorge I would like to explore.”

  P. C. Gatewood fell ill in 1968. In his old age, he had been a doting grandfather, and had served as mayor of the tiny village of Crown City for several terms. He is remembered by many as a fair and hardworking man, and a loving grandfather and great-grandfather. His own children had limited contact with him. Several of them confronted him individually about what he had done to their mother, about what they had seen and heard. He claimed to have no memory of it. No one recalls whether P.C. ever mentioned Emma’s notoriety, but they agree he must have known.

  Near Fontana Dam, 1970. Courtesy Lucy Gatewood Seeds

  According to his son Nelson, he made one dying request in his final days. He wanted to see Emma. He wanted her to come stand in his doorway, just for a moment.

  The woman who had walked more than ten thousand miles since she left him refused to take those steps.

  Her family did not attempt to keep tabs on her whereabouts. She’d simply disappear from Gallia County and return home with a new batch of stories.

  “Saw an Indian on one of my hikes,” she told a reporter in Huntington, chuckling, in 1972.

  Last summer, up back of Rutland. I had climbed the ridge and started down the other side. Just as I placed a limb across the fence, I looked up and saw a man in the woods. He had a gun. I hadn’t lived this long only to end up being shot in the woods, so I said, “Don’t shoot. I’m Grandma Gatewood. I tromp these woods all the time.” I could tell by his features that he was an Indian, at least part, and his expression showed that he had never heard of anyone by the name of Gatewood. Pretty soon another fellow came up. He told me they came from Portsmouth, were hunting grouse, and sure enough, the man with him was part Indian. “He knows more about the woods than anyone I know,” he said. The first man smiled, looked at me and said, “I’ve seen lots of things in the woods but you’re the most unusual sight I’ve ever come across.”

  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.

  21

  MONUMENTS

  1973

  If there was one place Emma loved, it was a deep and breathtaking sandstone gorge in the hills of southeastern Ohio, a place called Old Man’s Cave, which was carved by streams and percolating ground-water. Through the gorge, the stream snakes through a gallery of features, including waterfalls and eddy pools, diving one hundred feet in half a mile. The moist and cool hollow preserves typically northern trees such as the eastern hemlock and Canada yew, which have survived since the glaciers retreated thousands of years ago.

  In the winter, the falls freeze over, creating beautiful ice formations.

  The gorge is called Old Man’s Cave because it was once home to a recluse named Richard Rowe. Rowe had worked for his father’s trading business on the Ohio River until the early 1800s, when he took to the woods to live in solitude. There came a time when he disappeared for several years and was presumed dead. But then he returned. He told an acquaintance he had walked to the Ozark Mountains to find his older brother, but learned he was dead. Rowe told his brother’s widow that he had buried a stash of gold in a gorge in Hocking Hills, and that he would fetch it and return to take care of her. Back at his cave, he went out one morning to get a drink of water. He used the butt of his musket to break the ice and it discharged under his chin. Trappers found his body a few days later, wrapped him in bark and buried him on a sandy ledge at Old Man’s Cave.

  “They’re beautiful, those cliffs,” Emma once said. “In fact, I think it’s more interesting than anything I saw on the Appalachian Trail.”

  Every January, starting in 1967, she put on her red beret and led a six-mile hike through Hocking Hills, down by Old Man’s Cave. People came from across the state. She made lots of new friends. In 1972, when she was eighty-four, it was her job again to lead, to set the pace, but she was having trouble coming down. Her legs bothered her below the knees, mostly down the back. She had been trying to work the pain away with exercise, but she couldn’t overcome it. “I feel like taking off to the woods,” she’
d tell a woman a few months later, “but I don’t know whether I’d get back.” The trail by Old Man’s Cave is steep in spots, and one must climb gnarled tree roots that grow alongside the path. Age was finally wearing her down. She tried to traverse the winter landscape and struggled.

  When she could no longer do it safely, several men carried her over the rough spots.

  The following year, 1973, sensing it might be her last event, the organizers held the winter hike in her honor. They made her a hostess, and she stood at the trailhead in her signature beret, greeting her old friends. More than twenty-five hundred hikers showed up. At the lunch break, she was presented the Governor’s Community Action Award for her “outstanding contributions to outdoor recreation in Ohio.”

  She took a bus trip that spring, with an open-ended eighty-five-dollar ticket, visiting forty-eight states and three Canadian provinces. She met friends or family nearly everywhere she went. She sent a postcard home in May. Pictured on the front was the Pennsylvania Turnpike, “the World’s Most Scenic Highway.” Her handwriting was shaky. “Am having a nice trip,” she wrote. She stopped in Falls Church, Virginia, to visit Ed Garvey, who penned a popular book, Appalachian Hiker: Adventure of a Lifetime, about his thru-hike in 1970. She told him about the night on top of a moss-covered mountain she couldn’t remember the name of, when the stars looked like a million pinpricks of light in a blanket of darkness.