Falls affect more than 14 million older adults in the U.S. every year, but few experience them quite as frequently as 91-year-old Dale Sanders. According to his own tally, Sanders fell 71 times during his successful campaign to reclaim his standing as the oldest person to complete the Appalachian Trail. Six of those falls were classified by him as hard falls, including one that necessitated a short stay in the hospital and another that occurred a mere 200 yards short of the finish line.
Even so, none of these setbacks managed to permanently pull him away from the 2,193-mile (3,530-kilometer) wilderness trail extending between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy defines an official thru-hike as finishing every section of the trail within a 12-month timeframe in any order, with breaks permitted. Sanders initiated his trek on Sept. 6 in West Virginia, moving between different sections with brief rest periods before reaching the end on Monday at the summit of Maine's highest peak, where he took a moment to pray beside the summit sign.
"I had to thank God, and I had to thank my support team and everybody that got me here," he said. Sanders, who hikes under the name Grey Beard, originally set the Appalachian Trail age record in 2017 when he was 82 years old. Four years later, his friend M.J.
Eberhart, known as Nimblewill Nomad, set a new record at age 83. Just months after losing the record, Sanders announced his intention to mount a comeback. While Sanders found his initial 2017 hike surprisingly manageable, this recent effort proved significantly more grueling.
Despite undertaking six months of advance training, he noted that he was not in peak physical form 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, while hiking down Killington Mountain in central Vermont, Sanders fell forward into a field of boulders, badly scraping his arms, legs 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." A few weeks later, numbness in his left arm led to an admission at a hospital in Maine. What medical staff initially suspected might be a stroke was diagnosed as a pinched nerve.
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