Grandma Gatewood's Walk

Ben Montgomery

- 4.3 • 13 Ratings

- $12.99

- $12.99

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. And in September 1955, atop Maine's Mount Katahdin, she sang the first verse of "America, the Beautiful" and proclaimed, "I said I'll do it, and I've done it."
Grandma Gatewood, as the reporters called her, became the first woman to hike the entire Appalachian Trail alone, as well as the first person-man or woman-to walk it twice and three times. The public attention she brought to the little-known footpath was unprecedented. Her vocal criticism of the lousy, difficult stretches led to bolstered maintenance and very likely saved the trail from extinction.

APPLE BOOKS REVIEW

If you were inspired by Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, just wait until you meet the woman reporters dubbed Grandma Gatewood. This captivating biography draws us into the awe-inspiring tale of Emma Gatewood, who was 67 in 1955, when she became the first woman to hike the entire 2050-mile Appalachian trail on her own—and then the first person ever to do it twice. She achieved this feat with no tent or sleeping bag—just a walking stick and a homemade rucksack. Journalist Ben Montgomery’s book is packed with insights from Gatewood’s personal diaries as well as interviews with her children, and narrator Patrick Lawlor recounts her encounters with blizzards and rattlesnakes with a news anchor’s gravitas. This inspiring biography calls attention to a reluctant public figure who lobbied to make America’s hiking trails and national parks the treasure they are today.

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