This story was originally published on November 26, 2014.
One day, a 67-year-old great-grandmother told her family she was going for a walk. What Emma Gatewood meant was that she was leaving for a 2,000-plus-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail (AT). This was in 1955. Journalist and author Ben Montgomery tells the story in his book: “Grandma Gatewood’s Walk.“
Gatewood was the first woman to solo thru-hike the AT.
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“What inspired her was a 1949 National Geographic Magazine feature story about the Appalachian Trail, which was brand new at the time,” Montgomery says. “This story painted a very rosy picture of the AT. It said, ‘Anyone in moderate physical health could ‘hayfoot-strawfoot’ from Georgia to Maine. It said it was wide as a Mack Truck. There was food to be found all along the way…There was a lean-to, a shelter within a day’s hike. And Emma Gatewood found none of those things to be true.”
Gatewood, Montgomery says, was miffed.
“Near the end of the trail, when her story got out and reporters began to intercept her along the way…she was critical of the trail. She said, ‘An Indian would laugh at this trail.’ She found long sections that were completely unmarked, so she was constantly getting lost. This is what I argue in the book, that this criticism sort of led to a bolstered maintenance of the trail.”
Hence he made the book’s subtitle, “The Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail.”
But while Montgomery claims Gatewood saved the trail, he admits that is a controversial statement in the intense AT hiking community.
A trail less traveled: Few have hiked all 4,800 miles of the North Country Trail
Montgomery posits that, “She got far more attention than anyone before her. Her trip was covered to the hilt. Radio, television, newspapers. The Associated Press was filing daily dispatches for nearly the last two weeks on the trail in Maine. She introduced America to the Appalachian Trail. She broke down this barrier. Where before, folks may have been inclined not to hike it because 2,050 miles is a long ways and I probably can’t do that. Well, here this 67-year-old great-grandmother did it. She did it three times, I should mention. After her third thru-hike, the (thru-hiker) numbers double, and then they triple, and then they spike in this incredible way.”
Montgomery says that even before Gatewood hiked the trail, she was a natural pedestrian.
“She never drove a car,” Montgomery says. “So if she wanted to get around… if she wanted to visit her people, she had to rely on her own two feet.”
That wasn’t unlike a lot of people in rural Ohio, where she lived at the time.
“1955 was this really interesting period in American history in which the interstate road system is taking off, the automobile production and sale is taking off, the suburbs are growing,” Montgomery says. “As a result, the decline in ‘pedestrianism’ was intense.”
Equally intense was Gatewood’s dramatic finish at the end of her first AT thru-hike.
“When she crested Mt. Katahdin in Maine, the first spot the rising sun kisses in the United States on the Eastern seaboard, she did so without fanfare,” Montgomery says. “All the reporters were waving down at the bottom of the mountain. She had one lens left in her glasses and she was blind without glasses. And that lens continued to fog over. And she was wearing clothes she had found along the trail: men’s gloves. And she made it up to the top and she said, to no one in particular, ‘I’ve done it. I said I’d do it and I’ve done it.’ And she sang the first verse of ‘America the Beautiful.’ Then she headed back to civilization.”
Montgomery got interested in Gatewood because she is a distant relative.
“She was my mother’s great aunt,” he says. “My mother never met Emma. My mother did inherit stories about her from her own mother. Emma allegedly scared off a black bear with her umbrella when she was on one of her hikes. I remember growing up and hearing my mom telling these wild stories of adventure and I always kept that in mind. When i got an opportunity to pursue a book idea, she naturally came up.”
Montgomery is a newspaper reporter for the Tampa Bay Times. He is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the creator of the narrative nonfiction blog Gangrey.
This is his first book. “People told me it makes them wanna walk,” Montgomery says, “and so that’s the best thing I can hear.”
Author Ben Montgomery photo: Inkwood Books.
