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

· Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Patrick Lawlor
4.5
8 reviews
Audiobook
7 hr 54 min
Unabridged
Eligible
Ratings and reviews aren’t verified  Learn More
Want a 47 min sample? Listen anytime, even offline. 
Add

About this audiobook

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.

Ratings and reviews

4.5
8 reviews

About the author

Ben Montgomery is an enterprise reporter for the Tampa Bay Times and the founder of the narrative journalism website gangrey.com. In 2010, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in local reporting and won the Dart Award and Casey Medal for the series "For Their Own Good," about abuse at Florida's oldest reform school.

Patrick Lawlor has recorded over three hundred audiobooks in just about every genre. He has been an Audie Award finalist multiple times and has garnered several AudioFile Earphones Awards, a Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Award, and many Library Journal and Kirkus starred audio reviews.

Rate this audiobook

Tell us what you think.

Listening information

Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can read books purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.

More by Ben Montgomery

Similar audiobooks

Narrated by Patrick Lawlor