Quick Take
- Narration: Patrick Lawlor brings grounded warmth to Emma Gatewood’s story, his pacing matches the rhythm of a long walk.
- Themes: Resilience, women’s history, the Appalachian Trail as civic achievement
- Mood: Inspiring without being saccharine, quietly astonishing throughout
- Verdict: A deeply researched portrait of a woman who deserves to be much better known, narrated with the care the subject demands.
I grew up hiking sections of the Appalachian Trail and thought I knew its major names. I did not know Emma Gatewood’s. When I listened to Grandma Gatewood’s Walk on a long Saturday drive through Pennsylvania, appropriately, roughly the terrain she walked, I found myself pulling over twice to sit with what Ben Montgomery was describing. Not because the facts were unbearable, but because they were extraordinary, and I needed a moment to absorb each one.
Emma Gatewood was sixty-seven years old in 1955 when she told her family she was going for a walk and disappeared down the Appalachian Trail with less than $200, a change of clothes, and no hiking gear to speak of. She wore Keds. She carried a homemade bag over one shoulder. Five months later, atop Mount Katahdin in Maine, she sang the first verse of America the Beautiful and announced that she had done what she said she would. She became the first woman to thru-hike the entire 2,050-mile trail alone, and would go on to become the first person of any gender to walk it twice, then three times.
Our Take on Grandma Gatewood’s Walk
Ben Montgomery is a journalist by background, and his instincts here are exactly right. He does not inflate Gatewood into a symbol before earning that inflation. He builds the portrait incrementally, her eleven children, the farm work, the decades of a difficult marriage, the quiet reading life she sustained alongside all of it, so that by the time she walks onto that trail, the reader understands not just what she is doing but what she is walking away from. The biographical scaffolding around the hike gives it weight that a pure trail narrative would lack.
The book also does something valuable for the Appalachian Trail itself: it documents how Gatewood’s vocal public criticism of poorly maintained sections likely saved stretches of trail from abandonment in the postwar period. She was not just a hiker; she was, inadvertently, a conservationist and public advocate. Montgomery draws that line clearly without overstating it.
Why Listen to Grandma Gatewood’s Walk
Patrick Lawlor’s narration is well-suited to the material. His voice is steady and unshowy, appropriate for a story about a woman whose power came from exactly that quality. He handles both the biographical sections and the trail passages without differentiating them artificially, which is right; Gatewood herself seems to have experienced domestic endurance and wilderness endurance as continuous activities rather than opposites.
One reviewer who hiked part of the AT in the late 1960s noted that knowing Gatewood had walked those same sections decades earlier, without modern gear or maintained shelters, made the book almost impossible to put down. That historical layering, what the trail was versus what it became, partly because of this woman, runs through the listening experience in a way that is hard to shake.
What to Watch For in Grandma Gatewood’s Walk
One reviewer noted that the book is somewhat repetitive in places and could have benefited from tighter editing, a fair observation. Montgomery’s affection for his subject occasionally leads him to dwell on passages that make the same point twice. At just under eight hours, the runtime is very manageable, but the pacing is not uniformly crisp throughout.
A thoughtful review also noted that Montgomery is more interested in Gatewood as a human being than as a representative of structural feminism, and that a deeper analysis of the social context around her family life might have strengthened the book. For readers who come to it wanting social history rather than biography, this gap is real. The book is ultimately personal rather than political in its orientation, which is both its strength and its limitation.
Who Should Listen to Grandma Gatewood’s Walk
Anyone who loves hiking narrative, particularly AT-related books, will find this essential. It also works beautifully for listeners interested in American women’s history of the mid-twentieth century, and for anyone drawn to stories of remarkable persistence by people who had no obvious platform from which to be remarkable. Listeners wanting a trail-conditions guide or a how-to hiking book should look elsewhere, this is biography, not practical instruction. But as biography, it is among the best the outdoor adventure genre has produced.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Grandma Gatewood’s Walk cover Emma Gatewood’s second and third thru-hikes as well?
Yes, though the primary focus is the 1955 first hike. Montgomery covers her subsequent thru-hikes and her continued trail advocacy, giving the reader a full arc of her relationship with the AT rather than treating 1955 as the only significant event.
How much of the book deals with Gatewood’s personal life before the hike versus the trail narrative itself?
Montgomery devotes significant space to Gatewood’s biography, her eleven children, decades of farm life, and the circumstances of her marriage. This context is essential to understanding why the hike meant what it did. Listeners who want pure trail narrative may find the biographical sections slow, but they are what give the trail sections their emotional force.
Is Patrick Lawlor’s narration available in a version that includes any audio extras or trail recordings?
No. This is a straightforward narration without supplementary material. The audiobook is the text read aloud, and Lawlor handles it with consistent quality throughout. No sound design or additional audio components are included.
How does this compare to other Appalachian Trail audiobooks like Wild by Cheryl Strayed or A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson?
It occupies different ground. Strayed and Bryson write first-person contemporary accounts; Montgomery is writing biography about a historical figure. The tone is less confessional and more documentary. For listeners who want a fuller picture of the AT’s human history rather than a single personal journey, Grandma Gatewood’s Walk is the more expansive choice.
