Commended: Angie Romines for ‘Granny Gatewood’

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Angie stands on a rugged path. She is a white woman with long brown hair wearing hiking clothes. Behind her forest and the tops of mountains.

This week, we offer a warm welcome to Angie Romines, a writer, teacher, and Dolly Parton-enthusiast living in Ohio with her husband and two sons. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays 2025, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Rumpus. She is writing an essay collection about Kentucky women in her family tree.

This piece was written about an ancestor, Grandma Gatewood, who was the first woman to solo hike the Appalachian Trail. Even more remarkable, she accomplished this feat at the age of sixty-seven, carrying very limited gear with her to support her journey. Read the poems below and find out more about this incredible character.

Granny Gatewood
She fled to the woods, as anyone would in such circumstances. Teeth cracked in, tributary of blood coursing down from her broken mouth, she ran from her tobacco farmer husband, his hands cracked from the fields and his own unchecked violence. Her feet bare but hardened from farm-life, the hard life, she made for the treeline. Divorce was coming. Salvation was coming. But for now, she looked to the leaves for shelter. The memory of the forest is long with weathered rocks and centurion trees. The woods would wait for Granny Gatewood.
The pencil-yellow battered back issue of National Geographic spun its tale of adventure, bears, and craggy overlooks on the Appalachian Trail. The first attempt, a failure spoken of to no one, was one of broken glasses and starvation. But the next year, at the age of 67, Granny Gatewood told her grown children that she was going on a walk, no elaboration as to where or for how long. The children, who had seen what their father had done in those early years, knew what mettle their mother was made of.
Armed with a shower curtain instead of a tent and a battered paid of Keds, the woods opened its gate for her, welcoming her back to its dark shelter. Three times she walked from the stone mortared arch of densely-wooded Springer Mountain up to the rocky, barren peak of Katahdin. She did not have to run this time. She did not have to drag her broken body back to the man who broke it. She walked because she could. She scaled each mountain, stepped over gnarled tree roots, and crossed cold streams, slowly. What does it matter the pace at which you walk, the years it took to get Granny to the starting point? All the matters is the moment the woods, and her, together again, as the leaves crunched beneath her worn sneakers.

ABOUT THE POEM

A survivor of domestic abuse, Gatewood often ran to the woods for sanctuary to escape her then-husband’s violence. After thirty-three years of marriage to her abuser, she managed to acquire a divorce in 1940, which was a very rare thing for a woman of that time. The mother of eleven children, Gatewood lived a quiet, simple life in southern Ohio after her divorce. But in the early 1950s, she came across an old back issue of National Geographic that contained a lengthy feature on the Appalachian Trail.

Her first attempt began without much fanfare. She told her grown children she was going for a walk when, in actuality, she traveled to Mount Katahdin in Maine, the northern tip of the AT. After a few days, rangers found her in a sorry state—out of food, broken glasses, and lost—and convinced her to go home. Two years later, she tried again, starting from Mount Oglethorpe in Georgia and walking the Appalachian Trail from south to north. She walked for one hundred forty-six days, carrying a shower curtain as her shelter, a small denim bag for her food supplies, and a notebook. Though she took a tumble and broke her glasses again the day before summiting Mount Katahdin, Gatewood persevered and completed the Appalachian Trail.

Two years later, she completed the full trail again, making her the first person to hike the Appalachian Trail in its entirety twice. Grandma Gatewood continued to hike well into her 80s and has inspired future generations of women to take to the trails and see how far they can go.

To follow Angie and her work, go to Instagram @angie_romines, my Twitter/X @Angelaface, and Blue Sky ‪@angelaface.bsky.social‬.

Women of Ohio