You Will Never Know Enough to Be Ready. Emma Gatewood Went Anyway.
At 67, Emma Gatewood walked the Appalachian Trail on a lark. This is a story about acting on incomplete information, and what happens when your intel turns out to be bad.
In 1955, at the age of 67, Emma Gatewood told her children she was going for a walk.
She didn’t mention that the walk went from Georgia to Maine.
She left with a change of clothes, an army blanket, a raincoat and a shower curtain, all of it in a homemade bag slung over one shoulder. She had on her trusty Keds, and less than two hundred dollars in her pocket.
Gatewood had raised eleven children. She had survived roughly thirty years of a husband who used violence to keep her where he wanted her, and had finally divorced him in 1941. By all accounts, she had earned a quiet chair by a window and nothing more surprising than that.
And yet a magazine article got her up and out the door.
It was a 1949 National Geographic feature about the Appalachian Trail, and it described a wide, well-marked path with clean shelters spaced a comfortable day apart.
Emma worked out that no woman had walked the trail alone, and decided she’d like to see it for herself.
Right On Time is our weekly series of lessons in courage, clarity, and change for those rewriting their story.
The article oversold the condition of the trail by a long shot.
Emma found it overgrown to her neck in stretches. Unmarked for miles. Washed out. The shelters she came across were burned or collapsed, or too filthy to sleep in.
She got lost constantly. A rattlesnake struck at her. She walked through two hurricanes and lost thirty pounds.
Her verdict, delivered flat to a reporter later: she’d thought it would be a nice lark. It wasn’t.
She didn’t turn around, though.
Emma walked about fourteen miles a day, sunrise to sunset, out-pacing hikers half her age. And when reporters asked why she’d gone in the first place, she gave the least quotable answer available: Because she wanted to.
She wanted to see what was on the other side of the next hill, and then what was beyond that. It turned out to be a lot more interesting than a manicured, well-marked path.
That’s the whole engine. She didn’t have a solid plan or a five-year projection. She was curious, and that was enough for the trip to survive being lied to about the terrain.
We’re handed a lot of stories about how good decision-making runs the other way. Gather the information. Confirm it’s good. Move only once the picture is complete.
But there was no version of that walk that began with good information. Nobody had it. The men who wrote the article didn’t have it. The only way to find out what the trail was actually all about was to be standing on it.
The info we have ahead of time is always a little bit wrong.
The apartment is smaller than the photos. The town is louder at night. The place that looked full of people in the pictures has three people in it, and one of them is on a call in a language you don’t speak, and it rains 23 hours a day.
You find that out by going and doing. There has never been any other method that truly works.
Gatewood reached the summit of Katahdin on the 25th of September, 146 days out. She had one lens left in her glasses and it kept fogging over. She was wearing men’s gloves she’d picked up somewhere along the way.
The reporters were all waiting at the bottom of the mountain. So there was nobody at the top when she signed the trail register, sang a verse of “America the Beautiful,” and said, to no one in particular: “I did it. I said I’d do it and I’ve done it.”
Then she walked back down.
She never said it healed her. She never said what it meant to her. Afterward, Emma told reporters the trail was badly maintained, and that walking is about as nice a thing as anybody can do, and cheap besides.
That is as close to a moral to the story as she ever came.
Emma walked the trail again in 1957. And again at 76, in sections, becoming the first person to walk the whole thing three times. The Oregon Trail at 71, on foot, alone. Into her eighties, out clearing trail in Gallia County, ten hours a day.
The reward for finding out what was over the hill was another hill. She just kept walking over to have a fresh look.
✌🏻 Miranda
Sources:
Atlas Obscura, “The First Woman to Thru-Hike the Appalachian Trail Alone Did It as a ‘Lark’” — excerpted from Philip D’Anieri, The Appalachian Trail: A Biography
The Allegheny Front, “Grandma Gatewood’s Epic Appalachian Trail Hike” — interview with biographer Ben Montgomery
A Mighty Girl, “The 67-Year-Old Who Became the First Woman to Solo Hike the Entire Appalachian Trail”
Free Range American, “First Woman to Solo Hike Appalachian Trail Was an All-American Badass”
Appalachian History, “Emma Gatewood, 67, Walks Appalachian Trail Solo”
Ben Montgomery, Grandma Gatewood’s Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail
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