"Grandma Gatewood's Walk" by Ben Montgomery

The inspiring story of the woman who saved the Appalachian Trail, told by author Ben Montgomery.  Emma Gatewood, known as Grandma Gatewood (October 25, 1887 - June 4, 1973) was an extreme hiker and ultra light hiking pioneer who was the first woman to hike the 2,168 mile Appalachian Trail from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine solo, and in one season. 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. By September 1955 she stood atop Maine’s Mount Katahdin, sang “America, the Beautiful,” and proclaimed, “I said I’ll do it, and I’ve done it.” Driven by a painful marriage, Grandma Gatewood not only hiked the trail alone, she was the first person—man or woman—to walk it twice and three times. At age seventy-one, she