Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail by Ben Montgomery Page A
Authors: Ben Montgomery
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about her hike was spreading like prairie fire. The Associated Press dispatch from Boonsboro, Maryland, had made it all the way to Gallia County, in fact, and the newspaper ran a follow-up story on the local woman who was getting national attention.
Her exact whereabouts since she left here early in April to “go south” were not known until Friday afternoon when word came from Boonsboro, Md., of her progress along the trail which winds from Mt. Oglethorpe, Ga., through 14 states, eight national forests and two national parks, to its northern terminus atop Mt. Katahdin, Maine, some 5,200 feet above sea level.
The reporter interviewed Monroe, Emma’s oldest son, who was the wire chief for Ohio Bell Telephone Company in Gallia County. Monroe seemed surprised, but not worried.
“We did not know for sure what she was doing until just yesterday, although we were beginning to have our suspicions,” he said. “Mother is a great lover of the outdoors, enjoys perfect health, and can outwalk most persons many years younger.”
On a stretch of the A.T. through Berks County, Pennsylvania, Emma bumped into a group of Boy Scouts from the Shikellamy Scout Reservation, who promptly reported back to a columnist at the
Reading Eagle.
Emma had told the boys that she’d so far detoured for three copperheads and two rattlesnakes, and that she’d slept outdoors on a handful of freezing nights. The boys were mystified that she was wearing tennis shoes, the columnist reported. “She was wearing sneakers, and supposedly expert counsel on hiking comfort advises the wearing of stout shoes of good weight—not too heavy but tough enough to stand hard wear,” the columnist wrote. “When you’re a 67-year-old woman on a 2,050-mile hike, though, maybe there isn’t another person in the world who qualifies as an expert on how to take care of your own feet.”
News of her walk had even reached a young writer at a fledgling magazine called
Sports Illustrated
in New York City. Reporter Mary Snow began to wonder whether the eccentric grandmother on the Appalachian Trail might make for a good profile. The newspaper stories had addressed the
Who, What, Where, When,
and
How,
but no reporter had touched on the most important, intriguing question:
Why?
Snow would. But first things first: how do you track down someone in the wilderness who is hiking at a clip of fourteen miles a day?
Meanwhile, Emma had her own problems, besides her swollen feet. She had left Port Clinton, Pennsylvania, after a good night’s rest, enjoyed a lovely walk the next afternoon, bunked in a cabin at Blue Mountain for a dollar, then headed for Palmerton, Pennsylvania, on the morning of July 19. She tried to rent a hotel room, but the folks there wouldn’t let her stay. She wondered what she must look like. She had found a faucet that morning and washed her face, but without a comb she had no way to brush the knots out of her iron-gray hair. She had sifted through a campfire and found a fork,which she used as a comb. Now, though, she was leaving yet another hotel, exhausted and wondering where she should go for the night.
She was walking down the road’s shoulder when a car pulled up beside her in the dusk. Driving was a young woman from the hotel who appeared burdened by her conscience. She asked Emma to climb in, saying she wanted to take her into Palmerton proper. A few minutes later they pulled up at a hotel and Emma got a room for the night for two dollars. She soaked her feet in a bath and walked down the street to Sally’s Restaurant for a sandwich. Someone there told her she needed to meet Ralph Leh and the waitress, Sally, got him on the phone.
Leh, bespectacled and seventy, was retired from New Jersey Zinc Co., and he was quite the hiker himself. Besides climbing Mount Washington, he had spent the spring before helping clear the Appalachian Trail to Devil’s Pulpit on the Lehigh Gap. He knew that section of the trail like the back of his hand.
Leh invited
Her exact whereabouts since she left here early in April to “go south” were not known until Friday afternoon when word came from Boonsboro, Md., of her progress along the trail which winds from Mt. Oglethorpe, Ga., through 14 states, eight national forests and two national parks, to its northern terminus atop Mt. Katahdin, Maine, some 5,200 feet above sea level.
The reporter interviewed Monroe, Emma’s oldest son, who was the wire chief for Ohio Bell Telephone Company in Gallia County. Monroe seemed surprised, but not worried.
“We did not know for sure what she was doing until just yesterday, although we were beginning to have our suspicions,” he said. “Mother is a great lover of the outdoors, enjoys perfect health, and can outwalk most persons many years younger.”
On a stretch of the A.T. through Berks County, Pennsylvania, Emma bumped into a group of Boy Scouts from the Shikellamy Scout Reservation, who promptly reported back to a columnist at the
Reading Eagle.
Emma had told the boys that she’d so far detoured for three copperheads and two rattlesnakes, and that she’d slept outdoors on a handful of freezing nights. The boys were mystified that she was wearing tennis shoes, the columnist reported. “She was wearing sneakers, and supposedly expert counsel on hiking comfort advises the wearing of stout shoes of good weight—not too heavy but tough enough to stand hard wear,” the columnist wrote. “When you’re a 67-year-old woman on a 2,050-mile hike, though, maybe there isn’t another person in the world who qualifies as an expert on how to take care of your own feet.”
News of her walk had even reached a young writer at a fledgling magazine called
Sports Illustrated
in New York City. Reporter Mary Snow began to wonder whether the eccentric grandmother on the Appalachian Trail might make for a good profile. The newspaper stories had addressed the
Who, What, Where, When,
and
How,
but no reporter had touched on the most important, intriguing question:
Why?
Snow would. But first things first: how do you track down someone in the wilderness who is hiking at a clip of fourteen miles a day?
Meanwhile, Emma had her own problems, besides her swollen feet. She had left Port Clinton, Pennsylvania, after a good night’s rest, enjoyed a lovely walk the next afternoon, bunked in a cabin at Blue Mountain for a dollar, then headed for Palmerton, Pennsylvania, on the morning of July 19. She tried to rent a hotel room, but the folks there wouldn’t let her stay. She wondered what she must look like. She had found a faucet that morning and washed her face, but without a comb she had no way to brush the knots out of her iron-gray hair. She had sifted through a campfire and found a fork,which she used as a comb. Now, though, she was leaving yet another hotel, exhausted and wondering where she should go for the night.
She was walking down the road’s shoulder when a car pulled up beside her in the dusk. Driving was a young woman from the hotel who appeared burdened by her conscience. She asked Emma to climb in, saying she wanted to take her into Palmerton proper. A few minutes later they pulled up at a hotel and Emma got a room for the night for two dollars. She soaked her feet in a bath and walked down the street to Sally’s Restaurant for a sandwich. Someone there told her she needed to meet Ralph Leh and the waitress, Sally, got him on the phone.
Leh, bespectacled and seventy, was retired from New Jersey Zinc Co., and he was quite the hiker himself. Besides climbing Mount Washington, he had spent the spring before helping clear the Appalachian Trail to Devil’s Pulpit on the Lehigh Gap. He knew that section of the trail like the back of his hand.
Leh invited
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