Emma Gatewood

When you’ve spent years enduring the kind of hardship Emma “Grandma” Gatewood did, physically and emotionally, a two-thousand-mile hike along the Appalachian Trail with virtually nothing but the clothes on your back seems a reprieve. Not easy, maybe, but nothing you can’t deal with. For Gatewood, thirty-three years the wife of an abusive husband, the forest had already been a sanctuary. An escape from the horrors of home.

So when she set out to hike the whole damn thing in 1955, the first woman to do so, sixty-seven years old, a mother of eleven, a grandmother of twenty-three and a great-grandmother besides, she was ready. Even if she wasn’t exactly a hiker when she set out. She was hardened by the fires of real struggle.

Gatewood traveled without compass or map, relying instead on her own wits, maybe a helpful tip from a local out strolling the trail in the afternoon.

Gatewood’s tale of being the first woman — and a grandmother at