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

Name: Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail
Price: 14.36 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Ben Montgomery
ISBN: 9781613734995

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 67-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, having survived a rattlesnake strike, two hurricanes, and a run-in with gangsters from Harlem, she stood atop Maine's Mount Katahdin 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. Author Ben Montgomery was given unprecedented access to Gatewood's own diaries, trail journals, and correspondence, and interviewed surviving family members and those she met along her hike, all to answer the question so many asked: why did she do it?