She's hiked every trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In one week she typically logs 50 to 70 miles or more. She's an expert wildflower guide in all seasons. And for many, she is a valued friend. Her art is reaching through conventional barriers to communicate with anyone she meets. She has an unshakable conviction of the value of all human beings, of nature, and of God.

Born Margaret Elizabeth Roys on July 17, 1912, Margaret spent her first 9 years in China, the daughter of missionaries Harvey Curtis Roys and Grace Woodrow Woodbridge. She remembers her father as a wonderful man, kind, tolerant, and patient. He was a physics professor. Her mother was beautiful and brilliant, but suffered with increasingly serious schizophrenia and ended her life in a mental hospital. This early experience with mental illness and unpredictability seems to have given Margaret an unusually solid basis in her own identity. She has two younger brothers and a younger sister who died of scarlet fever in childhood. She remembers the death of this sister with tenderness and joy because of the way her mother handled it: Grace has gone to be with God.

The family returned to the United States in 1921, in order to better deal with Mrs. Roys' worsening mental illness. As Margaret became a teenager, she discovered the outdoors through Camp Fire Girls and the YWCA. She graduated from the University of Oklahoma in 1934 and went to the University of Pittsburgh for graduate studies in social work. There, however, she met theology student William Robert Stevenson, who in eight days and three dates persuaded her to marry him, Fifteen months later, they married; seven days later they moved to Kansas to begin a Presbyterian ministry. The ministry took them all over the Midwest, as well as to the South, before they retired to Maryville, Tennessee.

As a young mother, Margaret was chosen as a class project for a class in home economics. Bob was earning $54 a month and supporting Margaret and their first child, Judy, on that. Margaret's amenities were few: The kitchen, the report read, was small and contained a coal stove, a sink, and a kitchen cupboard...being the child of missionary parents, Mrs. Stevenson was accustomed to managing with little. Margaret's style of living is still almost inconceivably simple: her small house is simply furnished. She bakes her own bread. "Don't need a lot of things", she has said. The author of the report also noted that spiritual values were not the least gain to the students. There was something very heartening to Mrs. Stevenson's wholesome optimism.

Margaret and young admirer Jason Schultze

Fifty-six years later, her optimism is still wholesome, and her spiritual values have nourished many hundreds of friends. Margaret began hiking seriously in her 40's, beginning one day when she needed to calm herself. From that day she began on a walk that has lasted forty years so far, her walk with God, as she calls it. At first she went alone, but over the years companions have joined her, and now hiking in the Smoky Mountains has become a way of life. Hiking is her job, her venue, her council chamber, her parlor, and her place of meditation. For some who walk with her, and I am one, the act of hiking with Margaret has served as a confessional, a place to tell someone who cares but will not tattle, what a wretched mess they have made of their lives. It is a place to be forgiven and to learn how to forgive others. Margaret also teaches the most difficult kind of forgiveness: forgiving oneself. For her most devoted, constant companions, hiking with Margaret becomes a place to share an old-fashioned cheer-- a kind of beerless outdoor pub-- and a place to share some deep moments of silence.

Martin Buber: I have always said that if you want to win the hearts of men, you must first acquire their confidence. This is a way...based on trust and real security.

For a complete hiking log of Margaret's hikes to LeConte Mountain, Click Here.