MP3 Audio Sample
Short Synopsis
The story of Grandma Gatewood will inspire listeners of all ages by illustrating the full power of human spirit and determination, and answer the question so many have asked: Why did she do it?
Full Synopsis
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, sixty-seven-year-old great-grandmother had walked 800 miles along the 2,050-mile Appalachian Trail. And in September 1955, atop Maine's Mount Katahdin, she sang the first verse of "America, the Beautiful" and proclaimed, "I said I'll do it, and I've 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. The public attention she brought to the little-known footpath was unprecedented. Her vocal criticism of the lousy, difficult stretches led to bolstered maintenance and very likely saved the trail from extinction.
Author Ben Montgomery
Narrated by Patrick Lawlor
Publication date Dec 16, 2014
Running time 8 hrs
Available Formats
audio download