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...