"It's Always an Adventure" and while we can't get out to adventure right now due to COVID-19, what we can do is read about the outdoors! Pick up our SIXTH book club pick, Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail by Ben Montgomery, and join us for a virtual gathering on Thursday, December 10th, 2020 at 5:30pm Pacific Time/8:30pm Eastern Time to discuss our thoughts about the book in addition to our continued longings for our next great adventure!

A copy of the book club selection, Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail by Ben Montgomery, can be purchased via Amazon. Or rather, please consider supporting your local independent bookstore.

Enjoy the book! Hope to see you on Thursday, December 10th at 5:30pm Pacific Time/8:30pm Eastern Time on Zoom!

Newcomers are always welcome! Please direct questions, concerns, suggestions, and/or recommendations to krista.muscarella@gmail.com.

Description from Amazon: 

2014 National Outdoor Book Award Winner in History / Biography  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. By September 1955 she stood atop Maine’s Mount Katahdin, sang “America, the Beautiful,” and proclaimed, “I said I’ll do it, and I’ve done it.”

Driven by a painful marriage, Grandma Gatewood not only hiked the trail alone, she was the first person—man or woman—to walk it twice and three times. At age seventy-one, she hiked the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail. Gatewood became a hiking celebrity, and appeared on TV with Groucho Marx and Art Linkletter. The public attention she brought to the trail was unprecedented. Her vocal criticism of the lousy, difficult stretches led to bolstered maintenance, and very likely saved the trail from extinction.

Author Ben Montgomery interviewed surviving family members and hikers Gatewood met along the trail, unearthed historic newspaper and magazine articles, and was given full access to Gatewood’s own diaries, trail journals, and correspondence. Grandma Gatewood’s Walk shines a fresh light on one of America’s most celebrated hikers.