With his traveling partner Brad Tallent, twenty-five-year-old St. Francisville native Austin Graham has hiked the Appalachian Trail, traversed the Pacific Crest Trail from Canada to Mexico, skateboarded the entire Natchez Trace, and completed a three-thousand-mile kayak odyssey from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi River. But if Graham and Tallent want to keep up with Dale Sanders, a.k.a the “Grey Beard Adventurer,” they’re going to have to paddle faster.
“Dale’s the strongest paddler in the group,” said Graham by cell phone from mid-river, somewhere in rural Iowa. On May 15, Graham and Tallent joined Dale Sanders, a lifelong outdoorsman and pursuer of all things aquatic, at Lake Itasca, Minnesota, to embark on a 2,400-mile paddle down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico. This feat becomes significantly more impressive when you learn that on June 14, Sanders turned eighty years old. If he completes his journey he will become the oldest person ever to paddle the entire river.
Dubbed “Cruising for a Cure,” Sanders’ journey also raises funds for juvenile diabetes research—a disease suffered by his grand-niece, Anna. Sanders, who lives in Memphis, is a River Angel—one of a group of people who live along the Mississippi and provide support to paddlers traveling downriver. In 2013 Graham and Tallent got to know Sanders during their Gulf to Gulf Odyssey, when the Grey Beard Adventurer met them in Memphis and put them up at his home. They stayed in touch and, when Sanders began planning his own source-to-sea attempt, Graham and Tallent, who create videos of their excursions under the title Adventureitis Productions, decided to join him and create a documentary along the way.
“How far would you go for a thirty-minute film?” asked Graham, rhetorically, on Adventureitis’s Facebook page, in a post made somewhere south of Minneapolis while he, Tallent, and Sanders waited for a barge to pass through a river lock. To achieve Sanders’ goal of completing the river in eighty days, (at eighty years old, get it?) the Cruising for a Cure team is averaging thirty miles a day as it makes its way southward. If all goes according to plan, it'll be making stops in ports and towns between Vicksburg (July 30) and Baton Rouge (around August 7), greeted at each by local River Angels, talking about the journey, and asking for donations ($8 to $80) for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
Track their progress on Adventureitis Productions’ Facebook page, where Graham and Tallent post updates and videos regularly. Then come out and greet them or even join them to paddle a few miles. Because if Dale Sanders’ expedition has anything to say, it’s that one’s age need not be a barrier to living life to the fullest. More information and a link to donate to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation can be found at GreyBeardAdventurer.com.
