By USA Today Network via Reuters Connect
Betty Kellenberger doesn’t remember the name of the novel that, in one sentence, summed up everything she is. It wasn’t a very good book, she said.
In fact, “it was just an awful thing, just a random book that I picked up,” Kellenberger said. One sentence, however, struck her.
“It described the main character by saying, ‘He read a map as if it was a novel,’” Kellenberger said. “And this is what it’s like for me.”
It tells her story so succinctly, she said, that those 10 words have stayed with her.
Kellenberger’s house is filled with maps. They hang on the walls of her living room and are pinned to the backs of doors. The largest, an image of the Appalachian Trail, is depicted atop a massive area rug in the center of her sitting room. Pictured is the nearly 2,200-mile path, which passes through 14 states and runs from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine.
And Kellenberger, 81, reads that rug-turned-map like a novel she’s long-since finished and loved.
“I can remember what happened here,” she said on a Monday morning in late July as she gestured to one spot along the longest hiking-only footpath in the world. “I can remember this pass and when I look at this map, I revisit the trail again. When I look back on it, this is probably the hardest trip ever to let go of.”
The retired Carson City-Crystal Area Schools middle school teacher, who stands 4 feet, 11 inches tall, has hiked all over the world. She’s traversed part of Europe, and hiked in Iceland, Scotland, and Canada.
And last September, at age 80, Kellenberger became the oldest woman to complete a thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail.
Fellow trail goers call her Betty “The Legend” Kellenberger. It’s a nickname she’s accepted, despite the fact that she says she never meant to break any records when she set her sights on hiking the Appalachian Trail.
