When Emma Gatewood finished the stitches on her denim bag, packed with an army blanket and a shower curtain, she told her family she was going on a walk, and then set out to do what no woman had done before.
“No tent, no sleeping bag, no maps of any kind, and she was wearing on her feet canvas Ked tennis shoes,” says Ben Montgomery, author of Grandma Gatewood’s Walk. “By the time she was finished, she had worn out seven pairs of tennis shoes.”
Grandma Gatewood, at 67 years old, became the first woman to hike the Appalachian Trail. Only five people had done it before her. She went on to do it two more times.
Today, more 17,000 people have thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail from end to end, but when Gatewood set out on her 2,185-mile walk in 1955, it was still a new-fangled concept. It is unclear whether the Trail was even intended for a thru-hike.
“People who thought up the Appalachian Trail never imagined anybody would walk the whole thing in one fell swoop,” Montgomery says.
Gatewood first read about the AT in National Geographic, portraying it as a rosy walk in the park.
“The article said the Trail was as wide as a Mack truck, there was a place to sleep within every day’s walk, there was food aplenty to be found,” Montgomery says. “She found none of these things.”
Gatewood began what she thought would be an easy, fun walk through nature, criminally unprepared.
“She had some bobby pins and a tin of Band-Aids and some Vick’s salve, and some raisins and some Vienna sausages and some bullion cubes to suck on,” Montgomery says.
Nonetheless, 146 days later, at a pace of roughly 20 miles per day, she completed the Trail.
She found the hike to be severe, entirely unlike National Geographic’s depiction of the trek, that claimed “Anybody in moderate physical condition could ‘hayfoot, strawfoot’ from Georgia to Maine,” Montgomery recalls.
The paths were still fairly new, so Gatewood often got lost. As if the hike was not difficult enough, the 135-pound grandmother wearing jeans walked through two hurricanes in the span of eight days.
Montgomery mined newspaper archives of small towns along the Trail for accounts of Gatewood’s journey. Reporters had flocked to talk to Grandma Gatewood, hearing about the unbelievable task she was undertaking. They asked her why she was doing it. Montgomery relayed Gatewood’s simple, deflective answers.
“‘I didn’t have anything better to do,’ ‘I was tired of watching my grandkids,’ and ‘I wanted to see what was over that and then what was over the one beyond that and I just kind of kept going,’” Gatewood told reporters.
Her true reasoning had darker roots, however. For 30 years she had been trapped in an abusive marriage. Her husband beat her regularly, and the last time she thought if she stayed, he would kill her. She often escaped to the woods near their Ohio home until his temper subsided. On the AT, nature evolved from a hiding place to a new world of freedom.
“I came to believe that the Appalachian Trail, being in nature, testing herself against the earth, was her way to find peace,” Montgomery says.
One of Montgomery’s earliest editors was Earl Swift, a man who had thru-hiked the Trail himself in the ‘90s. Swift’s first response to reading the story was: “Ben, are you sure she did this?”
Like most logical people, he did not believe Gatewood could have hiked the Trail at her age, wearing what she wore, eating what she did. Swift recounted that when he hiked the Trail he ate 4,000 calories a day and still lost weight. Montgomery has found some records of what Gatewood’s subsistence was on the trail and believes she was starving most of the time.
“She ate apples, wild strawberries, and something she called sorrel salad. I can testify it just tastes like grass. There’s nothing salad-y about it,” Montgomery says.
Due to her diet and incredible pace, Gatewood lost 30 pounds in 146 days—an average of nearly one pound every five days.
When she was not foraging, Gatewood relied on the hospitality of households along the Trail. Montgomery gathered a few stories about these encounters. One comes from a man in Orford, New Hampshire. His mother was cooking dinner when they heard a knock on the door. It was Emma Gatewood.
“She walks in and brushes right past his mother and says ‘I’m Grandma Gatewood, what’s for dinner?’ and helped herself to a seat at the table,” Montgomery says.
Gatewood developed a following on her so-called walk, and by the time she drew near the end, the nation was taking notice.
“There were daily dispatches from the Associated Press, and the United Press headlined, ‘Will Granny Make It?,’” Montgomery says.
Of the fans who greeted her in Maine, one was Mary Snow, who wrote a feature story on her for Sports Illustrated. Snow bought Gatewood a ticket and flew her home to Ohio when she finished the trail.
It would be logical to think that Grandma Gatewood’s hiking career ended here. She was a living legend already. But Gatewood made a legacy of stomping on logic. In 1956 she became the first person to hike the AT twice. In 1964 she became the first to do it three times. She also hiked the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail in 1959.
These hikes strengthened Gatewood more than physically. While her abusive husband lay on his deathbed, he had one request. He wished for her to come see him. Montgomery reveals the inner fortitude Gatewood found on the AT.
“This woman who had lived in legend, who would have trails named after her and memorials built to her, she refused to take those steps,” Montgomery says.