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

Winner of the 2014 National Outdoor Book Awards for HistoryBiography 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, 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 Maines Mount Katahdin. There she sang the first verse of America, the Beautiful and proclaimed, I said Ill do it, and Ive 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.