91-Year-Old Dale 'Grey Beard' Sanders Finishes 2,193-Mile Appalachian Trail, Reclaims Age Record

Dale Sanders is 91 years old. He fell 71 times on a 2,193-mile hike and finished anyway.

On Monday, Sanders reached the summit of Mount Katahdin in Maine's Baxter State Park, reclaiming his title as the oldest person to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, according to the Associated Press. Trail-tracking site thetrek.co reported he crossed the finish at 11:44 a.m., closing out 359 days on the trail that started September 6, 2025, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.

By his own count, Sanders fell 71 times. Six of those he calls hard falls, one of which put him in the hospital and another that happened just 200 yards from the finish, according to the AP. MyNorthwest, which also ran the AP wire copy, put the hard-fall count at seven. This man got beat up and kept walking.

A Comeback Nine Years in the Making

Sanders first set the age record in 2017 at 82. Four years later, his friend M.J. Eberhart, trail name Nimblewill Nomad, broke it at 83, according to the Guardian. Sanders didn't sulk. He cheered Eberhart on and even hiked alongside him to keep him from quitting.

Within months of losing the record, Sanders announced he was coming back for it, per PBS. This time he did it smarter. His 2017 hike used a support van and left him depleted from digestive problems that dropped his weight to 135 pounds, according to thetrek.co. For the 2025-2026 attempt, he upgraded to a truck camper he called "Base Camp on Wheels," with volunteer drivers rotating through to cook meals and manage logistics. Eberhart, now 87, drove that truck for the first 800 miles, thetrek.co reported.

Sanders used a flip-flop route: south through Georgia last fall, a winter off, then back north in spring at a target pace of 12 miles a day with one rest day a week.

The Setbacks

In June, descending Killington Mountain in Vermont, Sanders fell into a boulder field and scraped his arms, legs and hands. "Thank God nothing got broken, but I was banged up," he told the AP. "I didn't rub the blood off, I just kept hiking."

Weeks later his left arm went numb. He ended up in a Maine hospital where doctors initially feared a stroke. It turned out to be a pinched nerve, according to the AP and PBS. Thetrek.co reported the incident happened just 54 miles from Katahdin, with 147 total miles left, and that Sanders spent a night in the hospital before returning home to Tennessee to recover.

That homecoming coincided with his wife's mother dying. By his own account, he considered giving up. His wife convinced him to press on, according to the AP. He went back and finished it.

Trail Angels and a Following He Didn't Expect

Sanders singled out Pennsylvania as some of his best days, crediting well-maintained trails and "trail angels" who brought him caramel frappes along the way. Younger hikers sought him out too. Thetrek.co named 29-year-old Nicholas Loukides, who hiked with Sanders in New Hampshire and called it a highlight of his own trip.

Sanders built a social media following in the process. "I wanna get it back, but right now, that's secondary," he told the AP. "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."

At the summit, he paused to pray at the sign marking the top. "I had to thank God, and I had to thank my support team and everybody that got me here," he said.

Sanders is now the oldest documented thru-hiker of the Appalachian Trail, a title he holds for the second time. Whether Nimblewill Nomad, now 87 and driving support trucks instead of hiking them, tries to take it back is an open question nobody involved has answered yet.