Grandma Gatewood

In 1955, 67-year-old Emma Rowena Gatewood decreed to her adult children she was going for a walk. She didn’t offer details and, facing a stubborn and resilient woman, her children didn’t demand any. She grabbed an army blanket, a raincoat, and a plastic shower curtain, stuffed them into a handmade denim bag, doffed a pair of Keds, and set off.

Half a year and 2,168 miles later she became the first woman to complete a solo hike on the Appalachian Trail and achieved hiking legendary status under the moniker Grandma Gatewood.

My grandparents owned a cabin in central Maine, a spot to which they retired before I was born. Each summer we would visit for an extended vacation. There, within driving distance of the terminus of the Appalachian Trail, I obtained my love of the mountains. My grandmother and father, as well as other people from the region, told stories of Grandma Gatewood. She held the status of a Meriwether Lewis or a Neil Armstrong.

What I didn’t learn then was Gatewood was, like I, from the great state of Ohio. Born in Mercerville in 1887, she was the daughter of a farmer, who lost a leg in the Civil War and suffered from alcoholism and gambling addiction, and a mother who essentially raised the kids alone. Another fact we didn’t know at the time of my youth was the hardiness she certainly inherited from her mother. More on this in a bit.

Half a decade before her trailblazing journey, Gatewood encountered an article in National Geographic about the A.T. and learned no woman had yet hiked it alone in one season. In 1954, a year before the historic achievement, she had actually attempted and failed to hike the trail. That year she started in Maine at Katahdin, looking to travel south.

Most hikers start in Georgia at Springer Mountain and work their way north. Katahdin is a notorious finale – it’s a true marvel of a mountain and a difficult foe. There are many reasons most people start in the south – warmer weather to begin early in the year, for one – but certainly, one reason is to end with Katahdin, after one has developed into a seasoned mountaineer. In the mid-1950s, that notion would only have been amplified.

In her first attempt, Gatewood broke her glasses early on, got lost, and had to be rescued by rangers. They told her to go home. She could have given up then, but a year later she rose again and started in the south.

During her 1955 trek, she became an instant sensation on the trail. Newspapers started to pick up on the story, tracking her progress. The Associated Press and Sports Illustrated wrote articles as she was walking. After she completed the path, she was featured on the Today Show.

Gatewood thought the experience would be a “nice lark,” but later ruminated on the difficulty of the trip: “For some fool reason, they always lead you right up over the biggest rock to the top of the biggest mountain they can find.”

Not satisfied with her accomplishment, she hiked the trail again in 1960 and then again in 1963, at the age of 75. Though her final hike was in sections, the last walk made her the first human being to complete the trail thrice. Additionally, she also hiked the Oregon Trail, a 2,000-mile hike from Missouri to Oregon.

In 2014, Ben Montgomery wrote “Grandma Gatewood’s Walk.” The world had known about her hiking feats, but the true resilience of this woman was not well circulated.

At age 19, she married P.C. Gatewood. Within three months, he started to beat her. Dozens and dozens of times, often within proximity of death. She wrote in 1938 that he battered her “beyond recognition” 10 times. He broke brooms over her head. He broke her ribs and teeth. On occasion, she ran into the nearby woods to escape being throttled, where she discovered some semblance of peace and solitude. Eventually, in 1940, she was able to divorce him, after he had threatened to have her committed to an insane asylum.

Reading the obituary in the New York Times, linked below, I found myself on the verge of weeping, in sadness and in pride for this woman. As noted there, many people escape to the woods or the trail to find solace. For Grandma Gatewood, this escape was more than a therapeutic solace; it was a lifesaving zone. I had always admired her for her hiking. Now she is something more.

I can’t write it any better, so I’ll just quote the end of the obituary and Montgomery:

As she closed in on Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the trail, in a rugged part of Maine, newspaper reporters extolled her achievement, and “much of America was pulling for her,” Montgomery wrote.

People, he said, were “clipping newspaper articles at kitchen tables and watching her traipse across the evening news on television, wondering whether she’d survive, this woman, in so mean a place.”

Little did they know what she had already survived.