At sixty-seven years old, Emma Gatewood slipped on a pair of Keds, slung a homemade denim sack over her shoulder, and started walking. Her goal was the Appalachian Trail, a rugged path stretching over 2,000 miles from Georgia to Maine. No woman had ever hiked it alone. Few men had done it either. But Gatewood wasn’t after records. She was looking for peace after decades in an abusive marriage and a lifetime of hard work raising eleven children in rural Ohio.
The woods had always been her refuge. As a young wife, she escaped into the trees when home became violent, and in time, the quiet of the outdoors became her safest place. When her children were grown, she decided to see if she could take that refuge and turn it into something larger. A magazine article described the Appalachian Trail as “a walkable path with shelters every night,” which painted a far rosier picture than reality actually presented. But Gatewood trusted her instincts. She pared her supplies to the bare essentials: a blanket, a shower curtain for rain, a dress she could shake out when she reached a town. Everything else she relied on came from the trail itself or from the kindness of strangers.
Her first attempt ended quickly when she got lost in the Maine wilderness, but she wasn’t finished. The next year, she set out again, this time from Georgia, and she kept walking. She crossed swollen rivers after hurricanes, braved stretches of overgrown trail, and asked for a hot meal when she needed one. By the time she reached Mount Katahdin in Maine, she had become the first woman to hike the Appalachian Trail from end to end on her own. Reporters nicknamed her “Grandma Gatewood,” and her story captured national attention.
She didn’t stop there. Two years later, she hiked the trail again, and a few years after that, she completed it in sections for a third time. She even walked the Oregon Trail from Missouri to Oregon to mark its centennial. What made her remarkable wasn’t just endurance. It was the simple way she proved that an ordinary person, even a grandmother in canvas sneakers, could take on something extraordinary.
