A 91-year-old hiker known as Grey Beard has become the oldest person on record to walk the entire Appalachian Trail, finishing after 359 days and 71 falls.
Dale Sanders reached the summit of Katahdin in Maine at 11:40 p.m. on Aug. 31, raising his hands to the sky at the northern end of the trail.
Born in the Kentucky backwoods in 1935, before the route had even been completed, he first hiked the whole thing in 2017 at the age of 82. When it was over he decided he would do it again.
This time he took a deliberately roundabout way around it. He set out from Harpers Ferry on Sept. 9 last year and headed south first, all the way down to the trail’s Georgia terminus, chasing the warmer weather before pausing for winter.
The falls added up over the months, and six of them were bad. The cumulative damage put him in hospital in June with a pinched nerve, at the same time his mother-in-law died and he had to go home to Tennessee.
His wife talked him into going back out to finish it.
He backtracked to cover an unhiked stretch in the Great Smoky Mountains, returned to where he had stopped in the north and walked on to Maine.
Along the way he kept running into what hikers call trail angels, the strangers who turn up with supplies and something sweet.
“When people are taking care of you and bringing you caramel frappes on the trail, the rocks don’t matter,” he told the Associated Press.
The Appalachian Trail Conservancy counts a thru-hike as one completed within a single year, in parts, from any start or stop point, so his scrambled route still stands. CNN put the official distance at 2,197.9 miles.
Sanders had already become the oldest person to hike the Grand Canyon rim to rim, and he is blunt about where he thinks the fitness comes from.
“I’m not knocking the gym, but you have to get outside,” he told the New York Times, which sent a reporter up Mount Lafayette in New Hampshire with him.
His advice to anyone younger, given to the Stein Institute for Research on Aging, is that “it’s OK to eat doughnuts if you also exercise.”
