The Old Hiking Dude
In 2022, Sam Chapman moved to Utah for the four seasons and stayed for the ridgelines. His TikTok and Instagram followers are just catching up.
The video that made the rounds is only a few seconds long: a man in a ball cap, phone held out at arm’s length, hopping across a gap in the rock on Bald Mountain with a lot of Uinta air underneath him.
Sam Chapman is 68. He’d like the record to show it’s 68, not 69.
He arrived in Utah four years ago after spending many years in San Antonio and Austin — long enough in Texas to know exactly what he was driving toward. “I moved here so I can hike and ski until I can’t walk or crawl anymore,” he says. “That’s kind of my standard line.”
The passion is older than the move. Chapman grew up in an Air Force family and lived in New York, Maryland, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Michigan and Alaska, where the habit took hold for good. Visits to his grandmother in Denver did the rest, his father driving the family up into the Rockies. “For some reason I always recall the rocks and the trees and the smell,” he says. “I wanted to get back to that.”
It has also solved the exercise problem. “I can’t stand the gym,” he says. “You put me on a treadmill for 20 minutes, I’m asleep. Put me outside, I go for hours.”
He is a high-altitude man by preference — 9,000, 10,000 feet and up, treeline and above, waterfalls, creeks, cliffs, anything with a view worth the climb. Most of his mileage is in the Wasatch and the Uintas, though he ventured south this summer for Goblin Valley and Little Wildhorse Canyon. Ask for a favorite and he names one most people have never hiked: the Honeycomb Cliffs above Solitude, a route he pieced together himself after skiing Honeycomb Canyon in winter and spending the whole run looking up. It isn’t on AllTrails. He recommends it at sunrise.
The gear question gets a shorter answer. Not poles, not a pack — shoes. Between plantar fasciitis, a plantar plate tear and what he calls very skinny feet, the shoe-orthotic-insole combination is the whole ballgame. “It’s not just traction,” he says. “It’s the comfort and fit and support.”
His advice for anyone who wants to start but finds the terrain intimidating is unglamorous and correct: do your homework. Read the topo maps, read other hikers’ trip descriptions on AllTrails or in the Hike the Wasatch Facebook group, then pick something gentle and build from there. “That’s what I did,” he says, “and I do some pretty butt-kicking stuff now that I never imagined I would have done when I started this four summers ago.”
Sam posts under @samtheoldhikingdude on Instagram. “I think people like seeing some old dude who does crazy stuff in the mountains,” he says. In his first month on TikTok he cleared 800 followers and 40,000 likes. Chapman has similar numbers on Instagram. Then, at the Lake Blanche trailhead, a trail crew member in a Brighton cap walked up and asked if he was the old hiking dude from TikTok.
“I just about died laughing,” Chapman says. He hikes at dawn, before the crowds and the heat. Increasingly, the crowds know who he is.
