The Appalachian Trail’s First Female Solo Hiker Started a Hiking Legacy

Maureen Gatewood and Caitlin Edwards have section-hiked more than 150 miles of Ohio’s 1,440-mile Buckeye Trail together. They’ve followed the footpath into sandstone gorges, over oak- and hickory-cloaked hills, past recess caves 90 feet high, and alongside cliffs that send creek water plunging into pools below. To anyone who finds them in the backcountry, they are a sweet mother-daughter duo out for a walk. But privately, they belong to hiking royalty. That’s because their great- and great-great-grandmother, Emma Gatewood, cofounded the Buckeye Trail in 1959, a few years after becoming the first woman to ever solo hike the Appalachian Trail. 

Better known by her trail name, Grandma Gatewood, the Southeast Ohio native was 67 years old, a mother of 11, and a grandmother of 23 when she quietly set off on a five-month odyssey from Georgia to Maine in 1955. She told her kids she was “going for a walk” and found herself alone in the deep woods battling weather, rattlesnakes, and hunger. Her sole possessions were a hand-sewn denim knapsack of supplies, Keds on her feet, and generational knowledge of the edible and medicinal plants around her. After all, she was raised in the foothills of the same mountain range, in rural Gallia County, a farming region on the other side of the Ohio River from West Virginia.

After Grandma Gatewood reached the summit of Maine’s Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, more of her story was revealed. Her husband, a tobacco farmer and teacher, physically abused her for decades before she divorced him and pursued a life of adventure. After walking the Appalachian Trail, which was the longest trail in the world at that time, and without so much as a tent, she went on to become the first woman to solo hike the 2,170-mile Oregon Trail, from Independence, Missouri, to Portland, Oregon. The same year, in 1959, she and Ohio Department of Natural Resources employee Merrill Gilfillan led a hike that designated 20 miles of Hocking Hills wilderness as the Buckeye Trail’s first official stretch. Hiking has been a Gatewood family tradition since.

The same rugged expanse where Grandma Gatewood set the Buckeye Trail in motion is now her great-great-granddaughter’s “happy place.” It’s where Edwards and her mother spread her grandmother Roberta’s ashes, and where the two started their journey on the Buckeye Trail. “I love hiking in Ohio,” Edwards said. “You have a wide variety from the foothills of the Appalachians, which are gorgeous, and then there are pockets that are just so unique in geography. The wildlife there—you won't find that even in other parts of the Appalachians.” 

She said that she was always aware of Grandma Gatewood’s legacy, but she didn’t take up long-distance hiking herself until the pandemic. In 2022, she and her mother completed a 20-mile challenge in the New Straitsville Section of the trail as part of an annual event deemed the Emma Grandma Gatewood Solstice—“EGGS”—Hike. “That was what really got us hooked,” Edwards said. Since then, she and her mother have completed almost three of the 26 sections, each 50 to 70 miles long.

Grandma Gatewood Memorial Trailhead sign. | Photo courtesy of Maureen Gatewood and Caitlin Edwards 

Grandma Gatewood’s imagined version of the Buckeye Trail was a linear path connecting Lake Erie and the Ohio River. Over time, the path spread on both sides of the original Hocking Hills section, snaking southwest toward the riverbanks of Cincinnati and eastward through the 244,265-acre Wayne National Forest, eventually cutting north to traverse Cuyahoga Valley National Park and touching Lake Erie’s sandy edge at Headlands Beach State Park. Then, later, it stretched southward again to loop back around and meet itself. It’s the longest trail confined to a single US state, forming a continuous loop within Ohio. It’s marked by blue blazes, like the ones used to signify side paths along the Appalachian Trail. According to the Buckeye Trail Association, the blue was intentional on Grandma Gatewood’s part, a sort of manifestation that her two beloved trails would one day connect—and now, via the American Discovery Trail, they do.

Edwards has a dream of thru-hiking the AT like her wayfaring forebear. She said she would honor Grandma Gatewood by doing it the “very basic, ultralight” way that her great-great-grandmother pioneered, though perhaps with more technical gear than Keds and a denim sack. She and her mother have already hiked part of the Appalachian Trail, near the border of North Carolina and Tennessee. They joined the Buckeye Trail Association together in 2022 and were elected to the Board of Trustees in 2024. In addition to working events, maintaining the trail, and advocating for conservation, their roles with the BTA involve standing in as Grandma Gatewood surrogates. The two have stories of fans asking them for pictures and autographs, even crying upon meeting them. Gatewood said it’s the resilience and “sense of empowerment” other people get from her great-grandmother, “just being.” She said, “People want to make that connection with her to give them strength and to know that they'll survive and they can accomplish whatever they want to accomplish.”

Despite the built-in notability they get from being nepo babies of Appalachian and Buckeye Trail majesty, “they don't remind folks who they are or who their family is,” said Andrew Bashaw, executive director of the BTA. As trustees, they are “focused on the aspects that get people out hiking,” which is exactly what drove Grandma Gatewood to invent the trail more than 60 years ago. Bashaw said it “does [his] heart good” to see the late hiker’s family carry out her vision.

Today, the 1,440-mile circuit is in the final stages of a three-year process to potentially become a national scenic trail, a coveted congressional designation granted to only 11 other long-distance trails in the country. Until then, Caitlin Edwards and Maureen Gatewood plan to continue working their way clockwise around the loop, taking on a 56-mile stretch through the remote and notoriously challenging Shawnee State Forest next. It will be the last time the Buckeye Trail leads them within 50 miles of their muse’s resting place, a gravesite one mile from the Ohio River, marked by a flat headstone with the simple inscription “Emma R. Gatewood – Grandma.”