More than 14 million older adults fall every year in the US, perhaps none so often as 91-year-old Dale Sanders.
By his count, Sanders fell 71 times while reclaiming his record as the oldest hiker to complete the Appalachian Trail. Six were what he calls hard falls, including one that led to a brief hospitalization and another just 200 yards from the finish. But none were enough to permanently divert him from the 2,193-mile rail that runs between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine.
The Appalachian Trail Conservancy defines a thru-hike as completing all of the trail’s sections in any order within a year, allowing for pauses. Sanders started Sept. 6 in West Virginia, hopscotched around with some brief breaks and finished Monday atop Maine’s highest peak, where he paused to pray at the sign marking the summit.
“I had to thank God, and I had to thank my support team and everybody that got me here,” he said.
A long-planned comeback
Sanders, whose trail name is Grey Beard, first set the Appalachian Trail record in 2017 at age 82. Four years later, his 83-year-old friend M.J. Eberhart, aka Nimblewill Nomad, took the title. But within months, Sanders announced his comeback plan.
While Sanders’ first journey was easier than he expected, the latest was considerably harder. Despite six months of training, he said he wasn’t in the best condition when he returned to the trail.
“And even today, I feel that I should probably be in better shape than I am,” he said last month. “But I just have to always go back and say, ‘But I am 91, so I’m blazing new ground hiking long distances like this.’”
In June, Sanders was descending Killington Mountain in central Vermont when he fell forward in a boulder field, scraping his legs, arms and hands.
“Thank God nothing got broken, but I was banged up,” he said. “I didn’t rub the blood off, I just kept hiking.”
Weeks later, his left arm went numb and he ended up at a Maine hospital. What doctors initially feared was a stroke turned out to be a pinched nerve, but though he was soon cleared to resume hiking, he considered giving up.
He returned home to Tennessee in early August to be with his wife, whose mother had just died, and she convinced him to press on.
His mission changed along the way
Some of Sanders’ best days were in Pennsylvania, where he enjoyed well-maintained trails and treats delivered by “trail angels.”
“When people are taking care of you and bringing you caramel frappes on the trail, the rocks don’t matter,” he said.
In fact, Sanders has become something of a star among fellow hikers. Thousands more follow him on social media, which surprised Sanders and caused him to expand his mission beyond reclaiming his record.
“I wanna get it back, but right now, that’s secondary,” he said. “Right now, what’s the most important thing – and it’s one of the things that surprised me – is that people are motivated and given encouragement by my efforts.”
Meredith Ewenson, who met Sanders in June while leading a hike in New Hampshire for 10 other women, said he embodied not just the idea that anything is possible, but that the journey matters most.
“Seeing it in real life is something that I’ll definitely remember forever,” she said.
Ewenson said her group spotted Sanders early in the morning, but it wasn’t until he blazed by them hours later that they saw the Grey Beard logo on his T-shirt and realized who he was. They caught up with him that night at an Appalachian Mountain Club hut, arriving around 4 p.m.
“I got here at noon,” he told them.
The next morning, she and others cheered as Sanders performed a “victory dance” before setting off again.
“My first thought was ‘Wow, his mobility is insane,’” Ewenson said. “His face on that body just doesn’t make any sense. My brain couldn’t compute how he was so impossibly fit for being that age.”
Off-trail adventures
Sanders was born in Kentucky in 1935, two years before the Appalachian Trail was completed. Bullied as a child for his small size, he gained confidence in solo sports like acrobatics and swimming. He later served in the Navy and retired in 2002 after a long career in parks and recreation.
Sanders holds numerous other age-related records, including becoming the oldest person to paddle the entire length of the Mississippi River, an 87-day trip he started on his 87th birthday.
On his latest adventure, he tackled obstacles like downed trees or steep scrambles with vigor, though he started to get a bit wobbly toward the end of one 12-mile day. He laid down on the trail, said he needed a power nap and briefly fell asleep.
Two minutes later, he got up and kept hiking.
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