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

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

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

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

by Ben Montgomery

Paperback

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Overview

2014 National Outdoor Book Award Winner in History / Biography

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 hiked the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail. Gatewood became a hiking celebrity, and appeared on TV with Groucho Marx and Art Linkletter. The public attention she brought to the trail 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 interviewed surviving family members and hikers Gatewood met along the trail, unearthed historic newspaper and magazine articles, and was given full access to Gatewood’s own diaries, trail journals, and correspondence. Grandma Gatewood’s Walk shines a fresh light on one of America’s most celebrated hikers. 


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781613734995
Publisher: Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
Publication date: 04/01/2016
Pages: 288
Sales rank: 31,052
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Ben Montgomery is a staff writer at the Tampa Bay Times and cofounder of the Auburn Chautauqua, a Southern writers’ collective. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010 and has won many other national writing awards. He lives in Florida.

Table of Contents

1 Pick Up Your Feet 1

2 Go Home, Grandma 13

3 Rhododendron and Rattlesnakes 31

4 Wild Dogs 45

5 How'd You Get in Here? 57

6 Our Fight 69

7 Lady Tramp 79

8 Attention 89

9 Good Hard Life 99

10 Storm 107

11 Shelter 117

12 I'll Get There 127

13 Destruction 135

14 So Much Behind 149

15 All by Myself 169

16 Return to Rainbow Lake 183

17 Aloneness More Complete than Ever 201

18 Again 209

19 Pioneer Woman 219

20 Blazing 231

21 Monuments 245

Epilogue 261

Acknowledgments 267

Bibliography 269

Index 271

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