She must have found this story in a doctor's office. This is what her family says these days, that she came across this magazine in a doctor's office. A 1949 issue of National Geographic, which had a 16-page spread full of color photographs about the Appalachian Trail. This was in 1951. The woman's name was Emma Gatewood, and she'd never heard of the Appalachian Trail. Most people hadn't. The trail had sort of just been pieced together within the past 10 or 15 years, and it had gotten very little media attention. It wasn't well known. The National Geographic article said the trail had been created for the enjoyment of anyone in normal good health, and that it doesn't demand special skill or training to traverse. It recommended that hikers wear suitable clothing and carry enough food or know where meals may be had. It said there were lean-tos within every day's walk, shelter to sleep in. It sort of painted a very roseate picture of what a through hike of hiking the entire Appalachian Trail might look like. Emma Gatewood had spent most of her life farming and raising 11 children. By the time she read the article, they were grown up. And one day, when she was 67, she told them she was going on a walk. The next they would hear from her would be via postcard that she dropped in the mail, somewhere around Roanoke, Virginia, having walked there from Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia. And it said, you know, by walk, I mean I'm through hiking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. She was going to try to make it 2,200 miles. I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is Love. Before Emma Gatewood decided to hike the Appalachian Trail, isn't this funny? We're going to battle this, because you're going to say Appalachian, and I'm going to say Appalachian, and I'm not going to change. Wait, how many people had done the thru-hike before her? The people who had done it before that were at a maximum seven people, at a minimum like five people. All men. Writer Ben Montgomery. Just to be technical about this, that means walking by yourself in one direction for the whole thing in one season. The first person reported to through-hike the Appalachian Trail was a man named Earl Schaefer. He had fought in World War II. He came back to the United States and was dealing with what we now know as PTSD. He was undiagnosed, but, you know, these are the things he was talking about. I need to walk the war off, is what he said. When Earl Schaefer finished the trail in Maine, some people didn't believe that he'd done it until he showed them pictures and his journal. What was the original idea for the trail? In the early 1920s, a man named Benton Mackay stood atop a peak somewhere in the Green Mountains of Vermont, looking south. And he thought to himself, we should start right now. By the way, just the context of this, the automobile was coming. More and more automobiles were on the roads. The roads were not built to handle automobiles. There's lots of government retrofitting for auto traffic. And he saw this extensive chain of mountains that ran from Canada to Florida, basically. And he decided we should have, we should right now preserve a path through the wilderness so that anybody who lives on the eastern seaboard be able to take a day off, drive out to this trail, and get on it and hike wherever they want to go. Hiking clubs, who liked the idea, offered to help. They started mapping out a path and painting white blazes on trees and rocks to mark it. People worked on it piece by piece. And in 1937, it was finished. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which was a new organization that was trying to bring attention to the new, very new Appalachian Trail in the 1940s, they actually pitched a story to National Geographic magazine saying, we've already got it prepackaged. We've written the piece. We've taken the photographs. If you'll just run it. And National Geographic comes back to the ATC and says, that's not how things work. We'll actually send, if we're going to write about this trail, we'll send our own reporter and photographer out there. So they did this, and it wound up taking much longer than anyone had expected. So in between the time the story was actually reported and written, and when Emma Gatewood comes across it in the 1950s, lots had changed on the trail. World War II had commanded the attention of anybody who was up for physical labor to join the war effort. And so people left behind trail maintenance to focus on winning World War II. And the trail had kind of fallen apart. If you're not out there routinely painting blazes, cutting logs, placing rocks through creeks, then the trail kind of has this tendency to come apart. In July of 1954, Emma Gatewood took four buses and then a taxi from Ohio to the northern trailhead in Maine at Mount Katahdin. She hadn't told anyone where she was going. And she just took a denim bag with some clothes, some food, and a blanket. If you've ever spent any time in the woods around Mount Katahdin, you know it's one of the most difficult wilderness sections in the United States. Later, Emma said, I have found the hike more rugged than I had heard. Three days in, she arrived at a trail sign that had rotted and took a wrong turn. Within a few hours, she realized she was lost. She searched for the trail, but couldn't find it that day. The next day, she kept looking. She was running out of food. She built a fire and tried to signal with smoke. A plane passed by, and she tried to flag it down, with no luck. And she wrote in her journal that she decided if she was going to die in the wilderness, She thought this was as fine a place as any. And she kind of resigned herself to not just quitting the trail, but to dying in the wilderness. Rangers started looking for her. They found what was left of her fire and walked through the woods, calling her name. Emma didn't hear them. Part of the problem was she broke her glasses very early on. And she set her glasses on some rocks to take a bath in a lake and accidentally stepped on them. And she was blind without her glasses. And so she had kind of used some tape to try to keep them together, but she couldn't see very well. And she gave it one more go, tried to find the trail again and found it, and then walked north again, back into camp where she'd come from. And she found the rangers who'd been looking for her in a biplane. They were all there playing horseshoes. And she walks up in their camp and they say, we've been looking for you. And she said, I reckon you have. One of the rangers said, I wouldn't want my mother doing this. They told her, Grandma, you need to go home. Catherine seeds Nash, Emma's granddaughter. The park staff put Emma on a train back to the town near where the trail began. She went back to the hotel she'd stayed at on her way in, but they didn't want to give her a room. And then when she looked in the mirror, she realized she had a black eye, and her sweater was all ripped to shreds, and her hair was a mess, and she smelled, and she realized why they'd turned her away. Emma went home to Ohio and didn't mention where she'd been. She didn't want to fail and then let people know that she had failed. That's my interpretation. She didn't want to have to give the disappointing news if it didn't work out. Yeah. So she went home, but then she tried again the next year and decided she was going to try from Georgia to Maine this time We be right back To listen without ads join Criminal Plus About 15 years before she left for the Appalachian Trail, Emma Gatewood had filed for divorce. It was 1940. She'd been married to a man named P.C. Gatewood for 33 years, ever since she was 19, and he was 27. A few months after their wedding, he became abusive, and it stayed that way for years. Catherine Seeds Nash, Emma's granddaughter. It got so bad that she actually left with Aunt Louise when Aunt Louise was too little to leave behind. And she went out to California to live with her mom, who had moved out there. Then she missed her family, so she moved back, and they made up. My mother says she was the made-up baby. She would, according to her children, run into the woods and hide out until her husband gained his composure, until she felt safe enough to return. and the woods were her refuge, where a lot of people think, I'm going into the wilderness, it's dangerous out there, and the house is where it's safe. She sort of had the other idea, like the home was not safe for her. Emma wrote, he would act so innocent and pretend he had not touched me and say I was not in my right mind. He even asked me what asylum I wanted to go to, and I told him any place would be better than home. Catherine remembers hearing about it from her mother and her uncle. And they tell the story how Grandpa was throttling her and she turned blue. And Uncle Nelson got up and said, you know, you need to stop. And Grandpa picked up a fireplace poker stick and said, get out of my way. And Uncle Nelson told him to swing once. It'll be her last swing. PC Gatewood left the house. And when he came back, Emma threw a sack of flour at him when he opened the door. He had her arrested and taken to jail. But the mayor, who saw her there, brought her to his house and told her she could stay there for a while. Emma let her children know that she was okay. And then a short time after that fight, she filed for divorce from him. And it was just not common. You know, culturally, it was frowned upon. In the divorce, Emma won custody of the children. And a judge ordered P.C. Gatewood to pay her alimony, $15 a month. Catherine says that when she was a little girl, her grandfather was still around. And a lot of my cousins that grew up with him don't believe that the abuse ever happened because they didn't see it. They didn't hear the stories because it wasn't really talked about. After the divorce, Emma worked odd jobs. She kept a garden and volunteered at church. And she walked a lot. It could be miles. She would just walk. She never drove a car. She's never learned how. And so if she wanted to go visit family and friends, it wasn't much for her to go visit a friend who lived six or seven miles away, which meant a 12 or 14-mile round trip on foot just to go say hello. You know, one time she walked from Gallia County to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to go visit two of her daughters who were living in Pittsburgh. 200 miles. And if there was something, because she grew up in the Depression, a farmer, if she found something on the road, she picked it up. Catherine remembers Emma kept a box of the things she collected. So I had fun going through the trinkets, and then as we were leaving, she said, here, look, I have a whole bunch of these stones. They're called fairy stones, and you can have one of them. And so I was able to pick one, and I'm actually wearing it today. It looks like a cross. It's faceted and formed that way in the ground. When Emma decided to attempt the Appalachian Trail, she started going on even more long walks to prepare. She secretly spent some nights in the woods near her home and tested which foods gave her the most energy and weighed the least. She made a little denim sack and put a shower curtain in and a blanket and some journaling supplies and wore tennis shoes. She preferred canvas keds. Occasionally, she would wear Chuck Taylor All-Stars, you know, the old school Converse. The second time she started on the trail, this time from Georgia, it was May. She brought a gingham dress that she could shake out and walk through town in, which she often did. She would duck off into the woods and slip out of her men's dungarees and her flannel shirt and put on a dress to walk through town and then change back into her outdoorsy clothes afterwards. You know, today we, some serious hikers, consider her the pioneer of what we call ultra light hiking. You know, in modern times, our packs are as light as we can make them. They're made of synthetic materials that's rain-resistant and titanium, tent stakes, you know, things like that. And she talked about this a lot. Like, why bring anything that you're not in desperate need of? She didn't bring a tent. If there was a cabin nearby with somebody, she would go up and ask, you know, could I sleep on your porch or in your barn? and most people were more than happy to let her do that. She said in her diary a couple places were nicer houses and they were a bit snooty and said nope. And a couple of cabins she'd go to and they'd lock their screen door and kept asking her questions. They were afraid she was from the FBI for some reason. But most of the time, she would put a bunch of leaves on her bag and use that as her mattress. If it was cold, she'd warm up stones on the fire and put those underneath her. You know, if there was fresh-clipped grass, you know, if somebody just mowed the grass on the median, she would rake it together and make herself a little pile of grass to sleep on. Occasionally, if it was raining, she would take her rain curtain, which, by the way, on the first trip, it was a shower curtain. The second trip, she had found this big piece of plastic. So it was no longer a shower curtain, but the same kind of shape. But she would take that piece of plastic and just lay it over the top of her and sleep under rainfall. And what would she eat? She brought with her sardines and saltines, but she knew all the plants and all the berries and everything she could eat. She would take sassafras leaves and make a salad. She would eat wild strawberries. She brought some bouillon cubes to suck on for the sodium, some peanuts, some powdered milk, some raisins. And that was essentially it. Once she cooked a porcupine and tried to eat it, but it tasted so bad, she said it took days to wash the flavor out of her mouth. Ben remembers telling a friend who'd done the trail what Emma had eaten on the trip His initial response to me was Are you sure that she did this? And I was like, she would have had to make up a lot of things You know, she was writing in her journal every day Place names and across this creek this day And I met this person on this day And she would have had to make up a lot of stuff if she didn't actually do this But his whole point was, if you're hiking 14 miles a day, which was roughly her average, you got to be consuming like 3,500 calories. If you're hiking the Appalachian Trail, it's the equivalent to climbing Mount Everest something like eight times. You're going up the tallest mountains and down the deepest valleys. And in that way, the trail doesn't make a lot of sense. It's not fun. You're always going down and going back up. Later, Emma said, I thought it would be a nice lark. It wasn't. There were weeds and brush to your neck, and most of the shelters were blown down, burned down or so filthy I chose to sleep out of doors This is no trail This is a nightmare For some fool reason they always lead you right up over the biggest rock to the top of the biggest mountain they can find. I would never have started this trip if I had known how tough it was. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, quit. One part where I'm shocked that she was able to do this, and that she had the nerve to do it, There was a big crevasse, and there was no other way around it. She had to jump it. Someone had left a sign there. It said, go fast. And, you know, she threw her bag over first, and then she took a running jump and leaped across and made it. Emma was on the trail during two hurricanes, and sometimes she got stuck and had to ask other hikers for help to wade through rushing water. One group of young men that helped carry her across a creek had come to the trail from Harlem. They were the leaders of rival gangs, and a local church had paid to send them on a week-long hike together, hoping they would make peace. In Virginia, a reporter and a photographer who worked for the Roanoke Times heard about Emma. And so they started looking out for her, and they staked out a spot on the trail until she came walking along and they said, you're the woman we've been hearing about. We'd like to tell your story in the newspaper. And she was reluctant at first because nobody knew that she was out there. Again, she hadn't told her children what her big plan was. She simply said she was going to walk. And at first she was standoffish and she told them, thanks but no thanks. And they were persistent. They offered her a night stay in the trail club cabin, and she took them up on that, and they fed her dinner, and they carried her pack for the last few miles. And then late that night, when they'd finally worn her down, she relented and told them all what she was up to. The men took Emma's picture. And the next day, a headline in the Roanoke Times read, Ohio woman, 67, hiking 2,050 miles. It continued, modestly reluctant to discuss her plans, Mrs. Gatewood travels light. It was then Emma decided to send her family a postcard to let them know where she'd gone. Other reporters started looking for Emma and publishing updates. Some people who saw her along the way asked for a photo or an autograph. One day as she walked past a road in New Jersey, a police officer drove up to her and told her, You're wanted on the telephone. He took her to his office. On the phone was a woman, a Sports Illustrated reporter in New York, who'd been trying to find a way to reach her. She wanted to meet Emma on the trail and write a profile. Everyone seemed amazed at what she was doing. She'd never gotten that much positive feedback in her entire life. A man who once saw Emma hiking told her, I've seen lots of things in the woods, but you're the most unusual sight I've ever come across. Despite the attention, Emma spent most of her days alone. She wrote, quote, I kept a fire for company as well as protection. She usually, you know, made a fire and camped for the night, but there was one day when she was just exhausted, it was hot outside. And she brought some leaves together and took a nap on the leaves, woke up, and there were vultures all around her. And that was all of our favorite story, because she must have smelled really bad for vultures to land all around her. And she just shook her fist at them and said, I ain't dead yet. We'll be right back. How long did it take her to finish? 145 days. She crested Mount Katahdin on September 25th, and she had left on May 3rd. That's a pretty good time. It's a really good time. Ben Montgomery is a distant relative of Emma Gatewood. She was his great-grandmother's sister. And he'd just finished the trail himself when we spoke with him. It's weird, because I feel like I knew the trail before this. Like, I know the whole history of it. I've talked to a million people who've through-hiked it. But, like, you don't really know the trail until you're out there. He says it was harder than he imagined. You can train in a million different ways. I ran an ultra marathon last November and felt really good about getting on the trail. And within a week or two, I was like, well, I forgot to toughen my feet up. So my feet are killing me. And I forgot to, you know, the training that you do is just not, unless you're actually walking up and down mountains every single day, even though you think you're prepared, you're not really. I'm really not trying to be cocky. but I think I could do it I mean the longest I've ever walked in a day is 33 that was pretty hard but I didn't stop I think I could do it I really would like to I gotta figure out how I can stop this podcast so I can walk it I think I'd go south to north but here's a question can you bring a little book to read at night? you can are you tired? it all depends yeah I mean you're tired but you can find time there are a lot of people who get to the shelter like 4 p.m. and you've got four hours to hang out before you fall asleep. Most people now read on their cell phone or listen to books as they walk. And how are you, so you have a portable charger, and how are you recharging that portable charger? You recharge it when you get into town, and you go into town about every, it depends on how frequently you want to, but I did about every four days. So the battery pack, now listen, we can't do this because I could do this for literally the next four hours These questions are just going to keep coming. We've got to get back to Emma. Okay. Emma Gatewood arrived at the official end of the Appalachian Trail a few weeks before her 68th birthday. She was the only one there. There was a logbook. She signed it. She said, It took me a long time to get to the top, and when I did, I never felt so alone in my life. Newspapers reported that she was the first woman to solo through hike the trail. One journalist called her a celebrity, and Emma said, I wish you people'd stop calling me names. And then, two years later, she decided to do it again. She wrote in her journal, kind of getting tired of people just foisting the grandkids off on me. And she said, I'm looking for a way to get back out there. She stitched a new bag, kind of assembled the same equipment, you know, and set off again in the spring of 1957. The year after that, she climbed six mountains in New York. And then she walked from Missouri to Oregon. Television producers asked her to make guest appearances. Here she is on a quiz show hosted by Groucho Marx. Were you born on a farm? Yes, I was. Emma, why was this? Did your folks, what did they raise on the farm in addition to you? Tobacco and corn, wheat and a little cane. A little cane? How big a family did he raise, Emma? Fifteen. Fifteen children? Well, he must have raised quite some cane. Do you think fifteen children in one family is a good idea? Would you recommend it to other parents? too many. They can't take proper care of them. Do you have children? I have 11. In other words, you don't subscribe to your own philosophy, do you? Well, Emma, now that your children are grown, what do you do for excitement? Oh, I hike. You hike? Yes. You mean you just keep walking all the time? What kind of walking do you do? I walk the Oregon Trail. The Oregon Trail? This year. Oh, you walked it? Yes. You mean like Lewis and Clark? Yes. It was kind of funny. Amongst the family, it wasn't that big of a deal. Oh, yeah, she did that good for her. But you know as a kid you don really understand what a grand thing that was Catherine seats Nash She does remember noticing her grandmother shoes One time at a family reunion, I was young, like four, and I stared a lot. And Grandma said, stop staring. It kind of upset her. And I didn't stop staring. And she said, what are you staring at? And I said, the holes in your shoes. Why do you have holes in your shoes? And I think she was a little insecure about how things were, her finances, whatever. And she said, well, if I had enough money, I'd buy new shoes. And my mother was like, oh, mama, she knows that if you needed new shoes, we would buy you new shoes. So she said, okay, well, I have these bunions and they hurt. so I need the holes in the outside of the shoes because my shoes hurt my bunions. And that explains what those large pointy bones sticking out of her shoes were. I mean, they were huge. On her first through hike, Emma went through seven pairs of shoes. Today, there's a pair of her kids in the Appalachian Trail Museum. Ben Montgomery says that when he hiked the trail, A lot of people he met knew Emma Gatewood's name. Someone told me that, oh, you got to respect a person who does the whole thing barefoot. So the legend has grown to include her hiking the thing barefoot, which is not true at all. The trail itself has changed a lot. 95% of the trail is different today than it was in 1955. because they're constantly rerouting it to avoid ecologically sensitive areas or to give the hiker better experiences or to get you closer to water or whatever, deal with private public property issues and so forth. The trail is always shifting and bending and moving. According to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, more than 3,000 people try to through hike it each year, but they say about three quarters don't finish. So these are people who have planned and got themselves to one of the terminuses and started with all the gear it requires, started a trip, and then decided somewhere along the way that they were no longer up to the task and bailed on it. When Emma was 76, she hiked the trail for a third time, in sections. She said, after the hard life I've lived, this trail isn't so bad. When Groucho Marx asked Emma to come on his show She was brought on stage along with a writer A man named Max Schulman There's one thing in your book I found extremely interesting, Max And you say that our society has developed a matriarchy Oh, clearly Could you explain this detail for Emma here? I'd be happy to This is a country run by women Yes When you and I were boys When Dad came home at night he could depend on it, that Mama was even more tired than he, because she had been baking bread and making soap and cooking dinner, everything. But today, with automatic washers and store bread and power steering, he comes home at night. He's bushed. Now, she says to him, don't you think we ought to flood the study and make an aquarium out of it? You know, things like that. Now, this poor, tired man lying there says, you decide, honey. There's no doubt about this. The women are in the driver's seat. But I don't think women like it, you know. They would prefer the men to run the home and the country. But the men have capitulated. The women have gotten it by default. That's right. So nobody's happy. The women don't want it. The men don't want it. And the kids don't know who their fathers are. In the video, Emma is standing between Groucho Marx and Max Shulman this whole time. She's wearing a dress and a jacket and a pearl necklace. Sometimes she looks at the ground and sometimes at Max Schulman. And then Groucho Marx turns to her. Emma, what about you? You've been listening to this kind of sophomore conversation here. Do you think it's a good idea for the wife to run the family? No. You don't, huh? Then Groucho Marx asks Emma why, after she'd raised 11 children, she decided to walk so far. He asks, what were you walking for? She answers, I like to walk. How did you arrive at that kind of a pastime? Oh, I didn't have anything else to do. The family's all married and gone, and I just wanted to do something. And how long was this trip that you... 2,000 miles. Between hikes, Emma worked managing a small trailer park. She told a Kansas reporter, People just can't believe an old woman is hiking. It's a funny thing. I work like a horse around the trailer court. But when I say I'm taking a hike, they say I shouldn't because I'm too old. I got up on the roof a while back and sawed off a tree limb. But no one said anything about that. In 1912, one journalist wrote in the magazine Saturday night, quote, Real walking is as extinct as the dodo. The writer Edmund Lester Pearson wrote that people pretend they are rushed, very busy. They say they haven't time to walk and wait 15 minutes for a bus to carry them an eighth of a mile. A man named Edward Payson Weston once walked from San Francisco to New York in 76 days. He said he wanted to become a propagandist for pedestrianism. In 1927, he was hit by a car in New York and used a wheelchair for the rest of his life. When the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was 33, he started going on long walks every day, sometimes for 10 hours. I am walking a lot and having tremendous conversations with myself. Every reporter asked her, especially after she finished the first through hike, they said, why are you doing this? Every reporter that talked to her, why are you doing this? And every one of them, she gave a different answer. You know, some of them she said, I did it on a lark. You know, I was bored back home. I don't like rocking chairs, she said one time. She told one reporter, I wanted to see what was over that hill. And when I got over that one, I wanted to see what was over the next one. And I just kind of kept going for 2,200 miles. Well, I was very happy to learn more about your grandmother. And I'm jealous. I would like to do what she did. Yes, yes. I think all of us aspire to do what she did. But I say I'm 63, so I have four more years. Yeah, that's right. This Is Love is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. This episode was mixed by Michael Raphael. Learn more about the show on our website, thisislovepodcast.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisislovepodcast.com slash newsletter. Ben Montgomery's book is called Grandma Gatewood's Walk. You can find it at the link in our show notes. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus. You can listen to This Is Love, Criminal, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and criminal co-creator Lauren Spohr, telling stories from the last 10 years of working together. And at the end of each episode, we share things we've been enjoying recently. To learn more, go to thisiscriminal.com slash plus. We're on Facebook and Instagram at This Is Love Show. This Is Love is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge and this is love.
