The subtitle of this book by Ben Montgomery is "The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Trail." I'm not sure I would characterize it as "saving" the trail, but the extraordinary story of her hiking the trail when it was still more an idea than a fully realized trail did bring a lot of nationwide attention to the trail and what it needed to improve. She was 67 years old when she decided to do this, having read about it in a National Geographic article. The year was 1955 and Mrs Gatewood had had anything but an easy life, married for years to a physically abusive man and with many children to care for with almost no money. But the husband is out of her life and the children are grown and she wants to do something for herself. She sews herself a denim sack to carry her belongings and wearing her Keds shoes, she hitchhikes, flies, buses and takes a taxi to the start of the trail near Mt. Oglethorpe, Georgia, 500 miles from her home in Ohio.
No backpack, no hiking shoes (she went through 5 pairs of Keds shoes), no tent, no hiking sticks. When she ran out of food she would forage in the woods, or stop at people's houses to ask for food or walk several miles into the nearest town and buy a meal. People were not uniformly kind to her--some were discouraging or even threatening--but enough were for her to get where she was going and make a lot of friends and create a real stir of interest along the way. She encountered bears and snakes and missing trail markers and dilapadated shelters and a group of young men from Harlem. Her children, when they found out through the occasional postcard from her or even from an article in the newspaper, were not surprised at what she had undertaken. She became the first woman to walk the trail from one end to the other. While this is a remarkable feat for a a grandma with a bad knee, it was even more remarkable that she did it twice more (once as a through hike and the third time completing the trail in sections). She also helped establish trails for hiking in her home state in Ohio. In 1959, at age 71, she completed walking the original Oregon Trail, another trek of 2,000 miles, adding only an umbrella to her meager baggage to keep the sun off. It was the year following the state's centennial and she was wildly celebrated and given a key to the city of Portland. So, while I am not sure she saved the Appalachian Trail, I would certainly agree that this is an inspiring story.
Kirkus called the tale "a quiet delight of a book."
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