Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail (20 page)

Stroudsburg was isolated for ten hours. Across the region, flooding rivers washed away seven bridges. A fleet of helicopters rescued 235 passengers from a stranded Lackawanna Railroad train in the Pocono Mountains. In nearby Milford, two men, tied together by ropes, found an elderly woman stranded in her apartment and carried her to safety.

President Eisenhower would declare six eastern states disaster areas in need of federal relief. The combined death toll for both storms would climb above two hundred and the damage would be estimated at well over $1.5 billion, the highest on record. But around noon on August 20, the rain began to subside and the rivers
grudgingly receded toward normal channels. The flooding failed to spread much father north than Northampton, Massachusetts.

In Hanover, New Hampshire, where tourists had holed up in motels because routes to the south were flooded or impassable, Emma walked on through town, unaware of the death and chaos spread out behind her.

She saw a couple of girls playing tennis in a park in town and she asked them if they wanted to go on a hike. The girls didn’t answer and Emma continued down the road. Two blocks later, she heard someone running up behind her. The girls had followed her. They wanted to know if she was the woman hiking from Georgia to Maine who they had heard about.

Emma told them who she was. She asked if they knew of a place to eat outside town, but they didn’t. One of the girls insisted Emma come home with her to have lunch. Emma thought the girl’s mother might be upset by a surprise guest, but she followed them back to the courts anyway. The mother was somewhat taken aback, but she made the best of it and drove them all home for sandwiches.

When her husband walked in the front door, he shook Emma’s hand like he knew her. She didn’t know why until he fetched his copy of
Sports Illustrated.
She had not yet seen the story, so she read it there. The man, Dr. Lord, phoned a friend who belonged to the Dartmouth Outing Club and asked if Emma could stay in one of their cabins along the trail. His friend was receptive. He said the trail was clean most of the way to the cabins and that she’d find them easily.

After lunch, Dr. Lord drove Emma back to where she had left the trail. When she got to the outskirts of town, a woman and some teenagers were there, waiting to meet her. They visited for a while and when Emma decided it was time to press on, the teenagers, two girls and three boys, rode their bikes beside her down the road for
two miles. One of the girls insisted on carrying Emma’s sack in her bike basket.

Emma never found the “clean” trail that Dr. Lord’s friend had mentioned. Instead, she hiked through weeds that stretched well above her head. When she came to a clearing, she noticed that an envelope had been pinned to a post beside the trail. Upon closer inspection, her name was written on the envelope. Inside was a note from a woman who lived in a red house just off the trail. The woman wanted to invite Emma in for tea.

The invitation made her happy. She felt like a dignitary. She joined the woman for dinner, then the woman’s husband, George Bock, told Emma how to get inside the Dartmouth Outing Club cabins. She arrived before dark and got a good night’s rest on a real mattress.

At noon the next day, as she came to a highway, she spotted a man waiting with camera gear.

You boys always seem to find me,
she said.

He introduced himself as a photographer, Hanson Carroll, from the nearby
Valley News
. He had been trying to track her down for a few hours. He first heard she had come through Hanover that morning, so he talked to Burdette Weymouth at the Hanover Information Booth, who showed him where the trail went up and over Moose Mountain. Not being endowed with the same energies as Emma, Carroll drove around Moose Mountain and waited along Lyme-Dorchester Road for her to come out of the woods. Within an hour, she came down the hill and into the road, tan and smiling.

He asked Emma whether she would mind if he took a few photographs and filmed her hiking. She said she didn’t. He took what must’ve been a hundred feet of film, shots of Emma eating lunch by the trail sign, walking along the road with two little girls and a boy, walking alone. She told him she had already worn out five pairs of sneakers. She was wearing her sixth. They talked about all
the attention she was receiving and he asked her if it bothered her. She explained that she was not adverse to publicity, so long as the reporters didn’t take up too much of her time.

He got the hint, but he asked her one more question.

Why are you doing this?

Just for the heck of it,
she said.

Hanson Carroll’s story ran in the
Valley News
on Monday, August 22, 1955. Its place on the front page was a curious, haunting reminder of how close Emma Gatewood had been to danger.

The bold headline at the top of the front page read: P
ESTILENCE
T
HREATENED AS
F
LOOD’S
T
OLL
I
S
C
OUNTED
. The smaller headline read: D
AMAGE
T
HOUGHT TO
B
E
M
ORE
T
HAN
$1 B
ILLION;
E
IGHTY
-S
IX
K
NOWN
D
EAD
.

Below the headline was a photograph of Emma, smiling, sitting in the grass and touching a sign that said
APPALACHIAN
TRAIL
. Below the photograph was another headline: G
RANDMA
W
ALKS
A
PPALACHIAN
T
RAIL FOR “THE
H
ECK OF
I
T
”

AUGUST 22-SEPTEMBER 11, 1955

Emma woke in the dark atop Mount Cube, its open ledges offering spectacular views both back down over the valley toward Hanover and to the north toward Mount Moosilauke and the White Mountains. She stood atop the pinkish-gray quartzite, which reminded her of granite or marble, and looked out upon what many hikers considered the most rugged part of the trail.

Besides the dangerous terrain, the White Mountains—and the Presidential Range in particular—were famous for unpredictable, erratic, wicked weather. The range was the collision point for several valleys that funneled winds from the west, southwest, and south. It was also at the center of multiple storm tracks that brought weather from the Great Lakes, the Appalachian Valley, and the Atlantic.

“The Highlands of New Hampshire have a bleak ruggedness that commands the respect of the hardiest mountaineer,” wrote Earl V. Shaffer, in
Walking with Spring,
his book about his inaugural thru-hike in 1948. “Some of the worst weather on earth occurs here, with winds of more than gale velocity and temperatures of polar intensity. Freezing weather is possible in midsummer and a snowstorm can follow hot weather within an hour…. The results can be overwhelming. Many people have died because they didn’t know or ignored these facts. Precautions should be taken. Scanty clothing should never be worn above timberline and emergency rations and gear should be carried.”

Emma looked out on the horizon, toward Mount Washington, the highest peak in the northeast at 6,288 feet. Though not impressive compared to the world’s tallest peaks, the mountain’s blustery weather—with year-round temperatures averaging below freezing and average winds blowing at thirty-five miles per hour—had caught many hikers off-guard. The highest wind speed ever recorded—231 miles per hour—was atop Mount Washington, twenty years before. Winds blew so steadily stiff that shelters had to be chained and anchored to the earth.

Hikers there had died from hypothermia, drowning, falling ice, avalanches, and falls. Two men, one in 1890 and the other in 1912, left the mountaintop on hikes and were never seen again. The year before her hike, two men died of hypothermia. The year after, two men would fall to their deaths, and one would be killed by an avalanche. By the time she arrived, some twenty-five people had perished on the mountain and scores of others had to be rescued.

Emma didn’t have any of the proper gear that Shaffer referred to, but what she brought in her sack had served her fine so far. She had been able to wash out some things the night before. She had also been greeted that night by a porcupine, a big thing, which came sniffing around her feet. She gave it a kick and thought it was
gone, but a little later the porcupine climbed up and got right in her face. She switched on her flashlight and he scooted away, never to return.

She set out that morning, coming down off Mount Cube on a series of shaky ladders, a new experience for her, but she managed just fine. She walked to a farmhouse near the base of the mountain and knocked on the door. Peter Thomson was eleven at the time, but he’d never forget the experience.

“My mother came and opened the door,” he’d recall fifty-seven years later. “She said, ‘Hi, my name is Emma Gatewood and I’m the first woman to walk the entire Appalachian Trail by herself.’” His mother invited the old woman in. Emma washed her hands and face and sat down to a home-cooked meal with the family. The two women would become good friends and pen pals, and Emma would visit several times in later years. She would inspire the elder Thomsons to take up hiking, and the couple would eventually summit all forty-six of the major Adirondack peaks, often accompanied by state troopers, for Meldrim Thomson Jr. would serve three terms as the mountain-loving governor of New Hampshire. His political success aside, for years to come he would open his home to Appalachian Trail thru-hikers, and his children would do the same, sending hikers on their way with maple syrup and a box of their mother’s famous pancake mix.

In 1955, the man who would become governor took some pictures of his sons with Emma, and the boys followed her for quite a way down the trail to pick blackberries. She spent the night at Eliza Brook Shelter and hiked along a difficult, challenging stretch of trail the next day, climbing Mount Kinsman, then Mount Moosilauke, the most southern of the four-thousand-foot peaks in the White Mountains, where she came out above the timberline. The trail was marked by cairns, and the view across the bald boulder field was incredible. She didn’t see a place to stay, so she followed a steep side trail that ran off the ridge, alongside Beaver Brook, and took her down seven treacherous ladders. She spent the night at a motel.

Emma with Thomson brothers (from left) Tom, seven; David, nine; and Peter, eleven; near the Thomson home in Orford, New Hampshire, on her first thru-hike in 1955.
Courtesy Peter Thomson

She climbed back to the trail the next morning and walked over Cannon Mountain, where she saw the Aerial Tramway gracefully whisking loads of people from bottom to top of the magnificent peak. A few of the tourists waiting in a small park at the summit gaped and snapped Emma’s photograph, as if she were an animal from the wilderness, as she walked through. She climbed down to Franconia Notch in the evening, dropped her sack on the porch of the only house she could see, and walked to a nearby restaurant for dinner. When she returned to the house for her sack, the folks there had gone for the evening, before she could ask permission to stay. A boy had mowed the lawn earlier and had raked the grass into
a big pile by the road. Emma waited until dark before she hustled over and carried three big loads of grass to a secluded spot by some bushes, where she fluffed it into a bed. She was one hundred feet from the road, at least, but she didn’t want anyone to see her sleeping outside like a vagrant, so she pulled her blanket up over her body and covered it with grass for camouflage. She was warm on a cold night and slept well.

On August 25, she hiked to Lafayette Campground, then walked back a little ways on the highway for a good view of the Old Man of the Mountain, a set of granite outcroppings on a mountainside in the shape of a man’s face. The great orator and statesman Daniel Webster once said about the outcropping, “Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoe makers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.”