Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail

by Montgomery, Ben

  “Most people today are pantywaist,” Emma Gatewood told a reporter five decades ago. I wonder what she’d think of us now. I wonder what she’d think of the gear we’re packing by the light of our headlamps, into ergonomically designed backpacks with what must be hundreds of pockets. Our Leatherman tools and cook-stoves and iPhones with compass apps.

  Our goal was to retrace Emma’s steps up Katahdin, using her diary and old trail maps as our guide. I wanted to see what she saw, walk where she walked, in a maddening effort to better understand her by covering the same ground she did fifty-seven years before, to the day, on September 25, 1955. “The end of the trail,” she wrote in her journal.

  This was sacred ground.

  Five months earlier, I stood on Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia with the same purpose. Like much of the trail, the start has shifted. The southern terminus is now at Springer Mountain—about twenty miles northwest of the more impressive Oglethorpe—where it was moved in 1958 because of development and farming. To try to get some sense of what Emma saw, I had to ignore several NO TRESPASSING signs on the mountaintop and cross private property before beginning a hike downhill. I’d tracked Emma’s footfalls through Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, though the trail has changed so much that it was challenging to know exactly where she had walked. I had climbed the bluffs overlooking Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, where she stopped to enjoy the majestic view of the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah. I’d talked at length with her four surviving children—in Florida, Ohio, Arizona, and Arkansas—and her grandchildren, and I’d read her journals and many newspaper and magazine articles as well as a big box of correspondence her family has preserved. I had run my fingers over her old walking stick, a thin but sturdy branch from a wild fruit tree. I thought of climbing Katahdin, the highest point in Maine, as one last sacred pilgrimage, a search for the intangible.

  In her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit writes:

  A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape, and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation, or to stalk your predecessors on it as scholars and trackers and pilgrims do. To walk the same way is to reiterate something deep; to move through the same space the same way is a means of becoming the same person, thinking the same thoughts.

  The Katahdin ascent is much the same today as it was in 1955, but more than half of the trail in Maine had been relocated. In 1968, after the passage of the National Trails System Act, the Maine Appalachian Trail Club reviewed the entire trail in the state and began to move the A.T. to a route that was more rewarding for the hiker and could be better maintained. Major relocation projects ran from the mid-1970s to the late ’80s.

  To be certain our climb was historically accurate, my wife and I hired Paul Sannicandro as a guide. Paul, a good-natured outdoorsman, is the trail supervisor at Baxter State Park, responsible for maintaining some 225 miles of footpath through a two-hundred-thousand-acre wilderness with forty-seven mountain peaks and sixty-seven lakes and ponds. The park was a gift to the people of Maine from former governor Percival Baxter, who bought and donated most of the land over three decades and established a fund, with his own millions, for its maintenance and operation. He wanted the park to remain wild, and despite logging and hunting and thousands of visitors a year, it has maintained for the most part the feeling and spirit of wilderness.

  We had met Paul two days before, over Maine lobsters at a dive in Millinocket. He reviewed our itinerary and he checked our packs to be sure we’d brought the appropriate clothing for the cold weather. I was already feeling like a pantywaist.

  Using Emma’s journal, Paul had calculated that she would have crossed the West Branch of the Penobscot near Abol Bridge, then walked along the northern bank of the Penobscot a few miles to the intersection of Nesowadnehunk Stream, then to Katahdin Stream Campground, where she spent the night before a hike up the Hunt Trail, past Thoreau Spring, to Baxter Peak. The next day, we followed her path, putting in about nine easy miles before we reached camp at the base of Katahdin, where we found a plaque implanted into a boulder:

  MAN IS BORN TO DIE. HIS WORKS ARE SHORT LIVED.

  BUILDINGS CRUMBLE, MONUMENTS DECAY, WEALTH VANISHES.

  BUT KATAHDIN IN ALL ITS GLORY FOREVER SHALL REMAIN

  THE MOUNTAIN OF THE PEOPLE OF MAINE

  P.P.B.

  The next morning, we filled our canteens with cold water from the stream, finished stuffing our backpacks, and dropped our extra supplies at the ranger station. It was nearly freezing and still dark when we signed the register and left the campground at 5:50 AM, the same time Emma left, with guide Paul leading the way through the moonlit forest, flanked on both sides by aspens and maples, evergreens and ferns. Six hikers had left before us and many more would follow. I tried to imagine Emma traversing the rough terrain in the dark, her only light coming from a small flashlight. Enough day-hikers come through this stretch now that the path is eight feet wide in places, but in 1955 it wasn’t much more than a game trail.

  It would have been impossible to accurately recreate in this spatial theater Emma’s misfortune. Her bad knee. Her broken glasses and busted shoes. The fatigue she must have felt after climbing mountains for 144 straight days on sixty-seven-year-old legs. But I soon found a thin walking stick, our common denominator, and let those other thoughts percolate with each step. Katahdin was dry for our hike, but it had rained in the days preceding Emma’s, so the flora was still wet then. Her shoes and dungarees were soaked quickly. “And I was not very warm,” she wrote. Besides the dungarees and long-sleeved button-up she was wearing, she brought along every scrap of clothing she found in her bag. A T-shirt, a men’s heavy wool pullover sweater, a satin-lined wool jacket, and a raincoat.

  The trail runs through spruce thickets alongside Katahdin Stream, past a three-tiered waterfall that sounds like applause. It’s barely visible in the gray light of morning as we pass, but I try to imagine Emma here, her ribs rising and falling with each heavy breath, trying to balance her sack on her shoulder while struggling over land where it appeared the sky had rained rocks. Alone.

  A century before she came through, before Earl Shaffer and Benton MacKaye, another pilgrim climbed this mountain. It was September 1846, and a group of men passed through Millinocket, then poled and paddled up the west branch of the Penobscot, camping at Abol Stream before moving up the flanks of Katahdin, or, as Henry David Thoreau called it, Ktaadn. Thoreau took the lead, bushwhacking through the backcountry, until he had a clear view of the mountain, which was different from any he’d ever seen due to the large proportion of naked rock rising above the forest. His companions set up camp, but Thoreau seized the remaining light and attempted to summit, climbing through “the most treacherous and porous country I ever traveled,” stopping at the skirt of a cloud. He notes that before him, Ktaadn, an Indian word meaning highest land, was first ascended by white men in 1804, and only a handful had climbed it in the intervening forty-two years. “Besides these,” he writes, “very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed it, and it will be a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way.”

  Thoreau turned back that day, but ascended again the following morning, leaving his companions far behind. He reached the tableland, a bare, rocky, gently sloping plateau, which he calls an “undone extremity of the globe.” He seems to have felt out of place on the mountaintop, frightened to be there.

  “This ground is not prepared for you,” he writes.

  Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother? Shouldst thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear.

  On his descent, he practically comes apart.

  It
is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man. We habitually presume his presence and influence everywhere. And yet we have not seen pure Nature, unless we have seen her thus vast, and drear, and inhuman, though in the midst of cities. Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth…. There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites,—to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we.

  I’m not sure if Emma ever read Thoreau’s essay on Katahdin, but her own words hint often at the idea that she was measuring herself against nature, that the wild brought her context like a gift. On the trail, she said, “the petty entanglements of life are brushed aside like cobwebs.” Thoreau writes that “some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more lone than you can imagine.”

  Emma told a reporter that she had found “an aloneness more complete than ever.” I’ve thought a lot about that statement. Larry Luxenberg, who interviewed some two hundred A.T. hikers for his book Walking the Appalachian Trail, says that if you applied the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator to the more than eleven thousand thru-hikers since Earl Shaffer, you’d find that the vast majority were introverts. Not so for Emma, who had no problem introducing herself to strangers or asking for a place to spend the night. She enjoyed company, to be sure, but found an equal reward in solitude.

  An hour or so into our hike we came to a bare spot in the trees. The sun was rising in the east, stretching bars of purple and pink across the horizon, beyond the treetops. After a slog up the mountain—and I mean to lend emphasis to the word up; I ran a marathon in four hours in March, but I was breathing heavily and my legs trembled if I stood still for any length of time—we broke through the timberline and found ourselves facing a ridge of bare boulders known as Hunt Spur.

  Our guide was well versed when it came to safety, and he had recounted for us several harrowing mountain rescues in which he had taken part. Anecdotally, injury visited hikers of all ages and skill levels. He told us about a man who tried to brace himself between two large boulders, and his own body weight had injured both shoulders. He had to be strapped to a stretcher and passed, rescuer by rescuer, down the mountain.

  When we were exposed on that bare ground, the temperature seemed to plummet. The wind bit hard. Paul reminded us that we wanted to add and remove layers to avoid perspiring, a key to cold-weather survival.

  “When I got above the timberline, the wind nearly blew me off,” Emma wrote. “I started putting on my extra clothes, a tee shirt, a man’s heavy wool slip-on sweater, a satin lined wood jacket, and raincoat. By the time I was at the top with two pairs of wool socks, and gloves with raincoat sleeves over them, wool hood, silk scarf and plastic rainhood on my head, and I was just comfortable.”

  At several spots, metal bars have been buried into bald boulders. Hikers must climb using the rods, like climbing on top of monkey bars. Somewhere along the spur, my wife, Jennifer, winced in pain.

  “You twisted your ankle?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, favoring her right foot. “A little.”

  She promised she was OK, perhaps out of stubbornness, and hiked on. But it was noticeably causing her pain. Paul insisted we stop, so we did, behind a boulder that shielded us from the strong wind. Jennifer was hiking in five-toed Vibrams, but we’d brought along a pair of lace-up desert boots we bought at an Army-Navy surplus store. As Paul examined her ankle, it struck me that even a minor injury could be a major problem at this height. We’d been hiking nearly four hours, still an hour or so short of Baxter Peak. Getting back down on a broken ankle would be damn near impossible. I pictured a helicopter hovering above the ridge, trying to hold steady, lowering a basket to carry Jennifer to safety. I wondered what Emma would have done. We had cell phones, and we’d already seen a dozen or so day-hikers, but she found the mountain empty.

  Paul thought Jennifer should change into the boots for more ankle support, and she begrudgingly laced them up, breathing warmth onto her bare fingers so she could feel the laces. We had a drink of water and ate some nuts and energy bars before setting off again, carefully. The surroundings, from our vantage point, were enough to steal your breath. The sun was finally high enough to catch the dozens of lakes and ponds far below, painting them white, as if someone had dropped a giant mirror on Katahdin and the shattered shards lay splayed beneath us.

  It was hard to identify any human activity at all in what must be the largest contiguous block of undeveloped, minimally maintained land in New England. I remembered something I’d read about Emma’s climb in 1954, the first time she’d ever been on top of a mountain. She put on a black wool sweater at the top and ate a lunch of raisins while she counted the lakes and ponds below. She gave up when she got to one hundred.

  We reached the Gateway, where the terrain levels off before rising again to the peak. Much of the tableland was covered with short, intricate, beautiful vegetation called diapensia. It’s a minimalist plant that looks like an evergreen pincushion, no more than three or four inches tall. Its tiny leaves grow tightly together, insulating the plant’s interior from cold. Intermingled with the diapensia is Bigelow’s sedge, a rare flowering plant that grows on flatlands at high alpine elevations. Both plants are threatened and must be monitored carefully, Paul tells us. If alpine regions shrink because of global warming or human activity, there may be no suitable habitat left for Bigelow’s sedge. And the Katahdin Arctic butterfly would disappear with it.

  The small butterfly is a subspecies of Polixenes Arctic and it is found nowhere else in the world besides the one thousand acres of tablelands on Mount Katahdin. Scientists have not accurately measured the population, but they do know it fluctuates dramatically. The females lay their eggs on sedges, and when the eggs hatch the larvae feed on the plants and slowly mature. In winter the larvae hibernate before starting to eat again in the spring. They mature to pupae in late summer and finally emerge the following year as adults, only to fly around for about a month, completing the two-year life cycle.

  Park rangers here at Baxter were shocked when, in the mid 1990s, federal agents raided the homes of a pest exterminator and two businessmen in California and Arizona and found thirty-seven Katahdin Arctic butterflies among a collection of twenty-two hundred rare insects. Their audacious poaching operation—agents found letters from one man advising the others to, if caught, say, “Sorry, I didn’t know you couldn’t catch butterflies here”—sparked the first federal case against butterfly poaching and opened rangers’ eyes to the threat of commercial butterfly collecting. What’s interesting is that the Katahdin Arctic isn’t big and beautiful like the monarch or the morpho. The prized and valuable butterfly is small, and dull brown in color. This target for poachers looks like a moth.

  A more predictable, manageable threat to Mount Katahdin habitats is walking. Hikers have destroyed diapensia and sedge through the years by trampling, until the park established a well-marked trail and signs to keep people off the plants. It’s soon clear that not all hikers bother to read them, and traipse across the tableland off the path. Paul, pissed off, shouts a stern warning to an oblivious hiker who is marching through the delicate flora.

  “Sorry, man,” the hiker says.

  Knowing the tenuous nature of plants and insects this high up makes me wonder if we should even be here. I left camp thinking we’d be trying to find Thoreau’s sacred ground, Emma Gatewood’s sacred ground, but I was beginning to feel like an interloper—even if we were sticking to the center of the trail.


  Thoreau Spring, in the middle of the tablelands, looked like a mud puddle, swarmed by the dozens of boot prints from yesterday’s hikers. As we would soon learn, there was a good chance that some of those footprints were left by men and women who had been inspired by Emma Gatewood’s journey here. But what had inspired her?

  We took a short break by the mountaintop spring and I watched it slowly trickle downhill. A thought struck me: Climbing a mountain, climbing this mountain, means following a river against the flow through the valley, then a stream up on the mountain’s flank, past waterfalls, and, eventually, to this little spring. It means walking against the hydrological cycle, against the order of things, to the source of life. To youth. To birth.

  Back home, I had told a friend, a newspaper guy out in Wichita, Kansas, what I had been trying to do, how I’d been stalking Grandma Gatewood on the Appalachian Trail, trying to get inside her head. My friend shared a story.

  In 1982, he and his wife put on their packs and began a multi-day hike up Pikes Peak in Colorado. After three or four days, when they’d finally reached the timberline, they were both exhausted. The flatlanders were in no shape to climb the 14,115-foot mountain. Every breath burned. Then my friend saw a bronze plaque affixed to a boulder, a memorial to a death on the mountain in 1957.

  DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF

  G. INESTINE B. ROBERTS

  AGE 88 YEARS

  WHO DIED AT TIMBERLINE

  AFTER HER FOURTEENTH ASCENT

  OF PIKES PEAK

  Thirty years later, my friend still remembered the marker. He remembered being amazed that this octogenarian returned to the peak time and again, and met death on her final descent.