At 91, Dale ‘Grey Beard’ Sanders reclaims record as oldest hiker to complete the Appalachian Trail

MILLINOCKET, Maine (AP) — More than 14 million older adults fall every year in the U.S., 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 (3,530-kilometer) trail 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. 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.