Dale Sanders was 82 years old the first time he became the oldest person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. He was 87 when he paddled the length of the Mississippi River. And on Aug. 31, at 91, he stood atop Maine's Mount Katahdin having done the trail a second time — reclaiming a record a younger rival had taken from him five years earlier.
Sanders, known on the trail as "Grey Beard," set out on the 2,193-mile footpath roughly a year earlier and finished the trek in 359 days, according to an Associated Press account of the hike. It was not a clean victory lap. Sanders fell 71 times over the course of the journey, by his own count, including seven falls serious enough that he calls them "hard falls." One, on Killington Mountain in Vermont, briefly landed him in a hospital after doctors feared he might have suffered a stroke; another came just 200 yards from the finish line at Katahdin's summit.
But I am 91, so I'm blazing new ground hiking long distances like this.
Dale Sanders, "Grey Beard"
Losing the title, then coming back for it
Sanders first claimed the oldest-thru-hiker record in 2017. Four years later, his friend M.J. Eberhart — trail name "Nimblewill Nomad" — took it from him at age 83, and Sanders spent the years since publicly plotting his comeback, according to public broadcasting's coverage of the milestone. Thru-hikes of the full trail are generally verified against standards maintained by the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which tracks completions of the roughly six-month, 14-state footpath running from Georgia to Maine — though Sanders' version stretched closer to a full year.
The record adds to a resume that already included that multi-month Mississippi River paddle at 87 and the original 2017 Appalachian Trail record, making Sanders something of a recurring case study in just how late the human body can be pushed toward endurance feats most people abandon in their sixties. He has said the physical toll this time was real — the falls, the hospitalization, the fear that a comeback attempt at 91 might end badly on a wet rock somewhere in New England.
It didn't. Instead, nearly a decade after he first set the record, and five years after losing it, Grey Beard climbed the last mile to Katahdin's exposed granite summit and took the title back — leaving Nimblewill Nomad, and anyone else who might fancy the record next, with a considerably higher bar to clear.