Barbara Batey

retired teacher · trail coordinator · one lifelong reading circle

Thirty-eight years of curriculum design taught me one thing worth passing on: people learn on their feet, in good company, with a book in one hand and the outdoors in the other. This little corner of the web is where I keep the lessons that never made it into a lesson plan.

Literature on the Trail

A six-week reading circle designed for senior hikers — pairing classic chapters with walkable excursions. Every session has a reading, a route, and a question meant to be answered under open sky.

read the curriculum →

Hiking for Seniors

Roles, schedules, and trail examples from three decades of leading groups — the practical skeleton of a program that keeps everyone moving at their own pace.

see the program →
"Every good classroom I ever ran had two walls missing — one opening on the bookshelf, the other on the creek. The best lessons happened when the students stood in the doorway."— from my retirement, which lasted a Tuesday

From my garden & my ledgers

When I'm not on a trail or a page, I keep a small herb garden (the rosemary outlives every volunteer), hum Mozart's Sonatas while I file, and over-book my own calendar on principle. This site is my second brain, and these pages are the chapters I actually tell people about.

Built with the forest in mind. Sources and working notes live beside each page as machine-readable twins.