The 67-Year-Old Grandma Who Walked the Appalachian Trail Alone

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people, coming to you from the city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. The Appalachian Trail is just over thirteen hundred miles of rugged wilderness, and at just sixty-seven years old, Emma Gatewood set out to be the first woman to hike it all the way through. Here to tell her incredible story is award-winning journalist and author Ben Montgomery, along with Emma Gatewood’s youngest daughter, Lucy Gatewood Seeds. Let’s take a listen.

It’s Rachel Marks. And you that in your life.

Here he is, the one, the only having next jo. Gotcha?

I have Emma Gatewood standing by to talk to you.

Now.

Where are you from, Emma? Gallipolis, Ohio. I amma. Now that your children are grown, what do you do for excitement? Oh? I hike? You hike? Yes? You mean you just keep walking on it? How? What kind of walking do you do?

I walked the Oregon Trail this year. Oh, you walked it?

Yes. I mean, like Lewis and Clark.

Yes.

When was this—this year? You walked the Oregon Trail this year? How did you arrive at that kind of the pastime?

Oh.

I didn’t have anything else to do. Family is all married and gone, and I just wanted to do something.

How old are you? Seventy-two? And how long was this trip that you were in? Two thousand miles? You walked a thousand? What are you walking for? I like to walk, andn’t I just? But isn’t it done?

I have to spend the summer that way.

Don’t you? Isn’t it dull if you don’t have some objective of some kind? Well? I after the other end? What happened? You? Turn around? Walk back again? Well?

This year I walked up Centennial, left to Portland, from where—Independence, Missouri.

Emma Gatewood met and married, when she was eighteen years old, a man ten years older than her named P.C. Gatewood, and they started what would be a thirty-year marriage and produce eleven children. What no one really knew, except the people who lived there with the Gatewood families—that Emma and P.C. Gatewood fought a lot, and that P.C. Gatewood was a hard-fisted barbarian and often beat his wife senseless.

When I was eight years old, things got so rough that Mama left. Mama would be horrified at my telling this story because she never ever referred to it in any of her interviews. That, I think, it’s an important part of her personality, her character, her strength, and how her self-confidence prevailed.

But nobody in the outside world really knew until one fight they had sort of erupted into public view, and Emma got some help from the mayor of a neighboring town who essentially gave her shelter until she could filed for divorce, and she did that in nineteen forty. And she started the first time to make it on her own. At that point, most of the children were grown and gone. They had left the house, and so there were just two kids left, both in their teen years when Emma filed for divorce, and this is when she started walking. In nineteen fifty-four, she decided she was going to try to hike the Appalachian Trail.

She wanted to do something that was noteworthy that no one else had done. There weren’t a lot of hikers on the trail, no one had hiked it from end to end in one season, and no woman had ever hiked it, and that inspired her. She decided she…

Could do it. She didn’t know much about what this trail was like. She didn’t know exactly where it went. She had read his story about it in a copy of National Geographic magazine, had colorful pictures and painted a very roseate scene on the Appalachian Trail. It said anyone in moderate physical condition could hayfoot straw foot from Georgia to Maine. It said it was as wide as a mac truck. There was a shelter within every day’s walk. It really gave some people the wrong idea about what it might take to hike two thousand and fifty miles. After all the kids were grown and gone, she was owning a little trailer park and tucking away money she was saving. Her Social Security jacket was not very much, but she wouldn’t need very much for a hike the Apple Legend Trail. In nineteen fifty-five, and she was setting off on long walks. It was a common thing for her to walk sometimes what we would think long distances—ten miles, fifteen miles—to visit a friend and come back home. She always found refuge in the outdoors in order to get away from her husband. She would run out into the woods and hide, and so the woods for her was a haven. A lot of people think of it as a difficult place to exist, and for her think it came to represent a safe place. And so she was completely comfortable in the wood.

And so she prepared without telling anyone where she was going, what she was up to, and she flew to Maine and decided that she would start from Mount to Todden, Maine, and then hiked to Mouth Or before Georgia.

I was going to hike that trail and just not tell anybody so that nobody could try to stop me. And I didn’t know what to pack, but I figured common sense had gotten me through that far, so it should probably keep on getting me through. Got myself on a bus, and before you could say, “I’m a Rowena Caldwell Gatewood, are you out of your blooming mind?”

I was in Maine.

Oh.

I started hiking the very next day.

And you’ve been listening to the story of Emma Gatewood, the first woman to ever hike the Appalachian Trail. And what a story, what a life lived: married at eighteen, eleven children, and married to a violent man who beat her. And what was so interesting is listening to her daughter talk about the fact that she didn’t want to talk about it to anybody. The woods were the refuge for her. The marriage in the end and that violence, well, something came of it for Emma, and then what came of it was eleven children. And what came of it was this desire, this connection with nature that led to that inspiring idea verse to be the first woman to ever hike the Appalachian Trail—two fifty miles. When we come back, what happens next with Emma Gatewood here on Our American Stories.

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Again, and I’d like to encourage you to subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every story we are here is uploaded there daily, and your support goes a long way to keeping the great stories you love from this show coming. Again, please subscribe to the Our American Stories podcast at Apple Podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we continue with Our American Stories and the story of Emma Gatewood, the first woman to hike the Appalachian Trail all the way through, and she just happened to be sixty-seven years old when she did it. And here to continue the story is author Ben Montgomery, along with Emma Gatewood’s youngest daughter, Lucy Gatewood Seeds. Let’s pick up where we last left off.

So she did, sort of, defeat it. She planned a hike two thousand and fifty miles, and she had made it less than fifty, and so she started putting things together for another attempt. She wasn’t done with the trail. The trail wasn’t done with her yet, and that’s when, in nineteen fifty-five, she told her children she was going on a walk. And when they heard from her again, she had dropped a postcard in the mail at Roanoke, Virginia, saying, “By walk, I mean I’m hiking the Appalachian Trail.” So that was the first many of them knew that she was on this quest.

And so she had a Troy guide, and she had foodstuffs, and she had changes of clothes, and she had tools, and I don’t know why all she did carry, but she didn’t get very far until she realized that she couldn’t carry a fifty-pound pack on her back. So she took out a half of that and sent it home. And then each time that she hiked, she would pare it down till she got down to about an eighteen-pound pack that she carried, and she decided to start a month earlier in April, but she flew through Georgia and started at Mount Oblethorpe, which is where the original trail started.

She brought with her not much. She had a shower curtain to keep the rain off, and she slept under that occasionally. She had an army blanket for warmth. She had a gingham dress that she could shake out in the event she had passed through a town because she wanted to look proper, and occasionally carried some foodstuffs: dried milk, raisins, peanuts. But she was not prepared for what she faced on the trail, which often was swollen creeks and rivers, improperly blazed trails. She got lost the number of times; there were great stretches that had not been maintained, which means trail had sort of disappeared back into the forest floor. In nineteen fifty-five, there were two back-to-back weather events that wreaked havoc right up the Appalachian Mountains. Two hurricanes made landfall back-to-back off the coast of North Carolina. They dumped unprecedented amounts of rain on the Appalachian region, and she was out there alone on the Appalachian Trail during both of those hurricanes. She would write in her diary things like, “Walked nine miles through water today, nearly got blown off from mountains, and that sort of thing.” But she never mentioned anything about hurricanes. And I’m not sure, to this day, that she—that she was walking through these two hurricanes. One night, she spends the night on some picnic tables up out of the rain with two boys. There were Navy boys, and they were on a fishing expedition. They had like eight days to kill, and so they were just doing a short hike on the Appalachian Trail and doing a lot of, so they all stayed together at the same shelter the night before. And then Emma, of course, gets up very early in the morning starter hikes before the sun comes up. And she made it down the trail to Clarendon Gorge, which was a sizely gorge, and there had been a footbridge that connected one side of the gorge to the other, but that because the flood had washed away, and she had no idea how she was going to get across. And she walked upstream aways and downstream aways trying to find safe pass that you couldn’t, and realized that maybe these boys, who were probably going to be coming up the trail behind her, could help. And so she sat down and waited on them. Here. They came a shot while later, and they decided, and all their juvenile was them, that the best way to get the three of them across would be to tie themselves together. And they had several lengths of parachute cord, and so they wound up wrapping Emma Gatewood up sort of in between them. The three of them stood together, the boys on the outside, Emma in the middle, and they just lashed themselves together with the notion that they could get across the river like this, and it worked. They took baby steps across the river. She was scared to death. I’m not even sure she ever really learned how to swim, but they made it across, and she untied herself and said, “Well, boys, you got Grandma across.” It worked out for them. She kept right on going. She did have to rely over and over again on the kindness of strangers. She had some know-how, some survival skills just from being reared on the farm. She knew the earth; she knew berries; she knew nuts; she knew what plants you could eat; she knew mushrooms. Anything that could be harvested, she knew, and she often did. But, yeah, by and large, if she needed a place to stay or a meal, she was not scared of introducing herself to strangers. If she met you, she would often become your correspondent. She would write to the people to new friends that she had met, collect their address upon meeting, you know, in her little journal. She could not have done it without help from people at key Spot, and she wasn’t afraid to ask for help. This one great story that hits home on that. I talked to a man named Robert Thompson. He lived with his family in Orford, New Hampshire, and he said that one day, it was in nineteen fifty-five, there was a knock at the door, and his family was just about to sit down for dinner. And his mother went to the door and opened the door, and there stood in Emma Gatewood, looking like she had walked all the way from Georgia to Hampshire. And in his memory he said that Grandma Gatewood just stepped sort of past his mother and sat down at the table, and as she was making her way there, she said, “I’m Grandma Gatewood. What’s for dinner?” Sort of gave birth to this idea that if you’re hiking the Appleachan Trail, you come to expect a lot of help. Like there’s something called Trail Magic. People leave food and water and other things out beside the trail for hikers because they know somebody’s gonna need it. And that idea of Trail Magic started in nineteen fifty-five with Grandma Gatewood.

Mama loved to sing, and when she reached the top of Mount Catad In was she climbed three times. She sang “America the Beautiful.”

She said, “I’ve done it. I said I’d do it, and I’ve done it.” But she wasn’t done. She had become the first woman to solo through-hike the Appalachian Trail. That means hike by herself in one direction. Two years later, in nineteen fifty-seven, she decided she’s just gonna do it again, and she took essentially the same stuff and set off in the same direction, and she became the first person to ever hike the entirety—solo hike—the entirety of the Appalachian Trail twice. And then she tried again a few years later. By the way, in nineteen fifty-nine, she hiked the Oregon Trail, which is two thousand miles from Independence, Missouri, to Portland, Oregon, to celebrate the Organ Centennial. And then she stitched together a third, what they called, section hike the Appalachian Trail, where she had done the entirety of the trail but at different times, and she finished that in nineteen sixty-four. So that made her the first person to ever walk the entirety of the Appalachian Trail three times. She’s a record she still holds.

I’ve been asked about our reaction—the children’s reaction to her hiking the trail. Did we worry? No. Mama always took care of herself. We knew she was independent; we knew she would do what she was capable and able to do. And so there was nothing story about.

And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler and Reagan Habib. And what a story about resilience. And my goodness, when the daughter was asked whether she worried about her mom hiking the trail alone, which, by the way, she did three times. “Did we worry, know? Mama always knew how to take care of herself.” The story of Emma Gatewood and the story of resiliency and triumph over adversity. Here on Our American Stories.