At 2,178 miles, the Appalachian Trail is the nation’s longest marked footpath. Starting at Springer Mountain in Georgia, it crosses 14 states, six national parks and eight national forests on its way north to Maine’s Mount Katahdin. But despite the trail’s daunting length, more than 10,000 people—called “2,000-milers”—walked it in its entirety, in sections over time or as a whole. In light of “Earl Shaffer and the Appalachian Trail,” an exhibition honoring the first person to hike the trail in one continuous trip (at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History through October 11), we take a moment to reflect on the trail’s groundbreakers, record holders and legendary characters.


1. The Founder

The Appalachian Trail was the brainchild of Benton Mackaye a land-use planner. Mackaye, who grew up about 30 miles west of Boston in Shirley Center, Massachusetts, was no stranger to mountains. The first peak he “bagged,” as climbers say, was Mount Monadnock, just a few miles away in New Hampshire. And after graduating from Harvard in 1900, he and a classmate hiked what would later become Vermont’s Long Trail through the Green Mountains. As the story goes, Mackaye was sitting in a tree atop Stratton Mountain in Vermont when the notion came to him of a trail following the Appalachian Mountains from Maine to Georgia. The editor of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects convinced Mackaye to write an article about his idea. Published in October 1921, “An Appalachian Trail, A Project in Regional Planning” fleshed out Mackaye’s vision. More than just a walking path, his Appalachian Trail was to be a destination where East Coast city dwellers could go to get back to nature—a place for recreation, recuperation and as he ever so transcendentally put it, “to walk, to see and to see what you see.”

4. The First Female Thru-Hiker

When Emma Gatewood set out to hike the Appalachian Trail in 1954, no women—and only five men—had ever hiked it continuously. The farmer, mother of 11 children and grandmother of 23 was in her mid-60s at the time, earning herself the trail name “Grandma Gatewood.” She had never hiked a mountain in her life, but that July, she started in Maine, with the formidable 4,292-foot tall Mount Katahdin, and every intention of going “a ways” down the A.T. In two days, she was lost. After running out of food, she turned up days later back on the trail at Rainbow Lake, where she had made her wrong turn. Reportedly, she told a Maine Forest Service ranger that she wasn’t lost, just misplaced. The incident spooked her though, and she went home to Ohio. The following spring, however, she was back at it, this time starting in Georgia. Five months later, on September 25, 1955, the 67-year-old finished the entire trek. “I would never have started this trip if I had known how tough it was, but I couldn’t, and wouldn’t quit,” she told Sports Illustrated. Grandma Gatewood would thru-hike the A.T. a second time in 1957 and a third in 1964.

6. Hikers, Young and Old

Believe it or not, there have been older 2,000-milers than Grandma Gatewood. Ernie Morris started section hiking the A.T. when he was 82 years old and finished in 1975 at age 86, becoming the oldest man to have hiked the trail. The oldest thru hiker is Lee Barry, who completed his fifth hike (three were section and two were thru hikes) in 2004 at the age of 81. Nancy Gowler, the oldest female thru-hiker, completed her second in 2007, at age 71. As for the youngest, 6-year-old Michael Cogswell hiked the entire trail with his parents in 1980. Another 6-year old boy tied his age record in 2002. And an 8-year-old girl became the youngest female A.T. hiker in 2002.