After breakfast and announcements of the day’s schedule at 7:30, there’ll be a sandwich-making buffet in the library, where we’ll all put together our bag lunches for the day. Shortly after that the vans will depart for hikes of local mountains – Moose, Cube, Black, Moosilauke – or a few miles of Appalachian Trail through long-overgrown farms and fields.

Elderhostel, it’s called. It’s been around for only 33 years, a far shorter time than have its participants; you must be at least 55 to sign up – though there are exceptions for companions, caregivers, or spouses of those who qualify by age.

Elderhostel started right here in New England in 1975, on the campus of the University of New Hampshire. A globe-trotting social activist and former educator had just returned from four years of hiking in Europe, where he noticed that people of relatively advanced ages were still active in outdoor pursuits and educational programs. (I’ve noticed the same thing myself, just north of the Canadian border, where men and women in their eighties spend weekend days skimming ten or twenty miles through the woods on cross-country skis.) Why, wondered the returned hiker, were Americans not as involved in robust activities? When he mentioned the phenomenon to a friend of his, who happened to be Director of Residential Life at UNH, their subsequent conversation gave birth to this expanded, geriatric version of the youth hostel program. At its core were not-for-credit elective classes on a multitude of subjects, coupled with comfortable, inexpensive accommodations. Since that first year, when 220 elders signed up, the idea has burgeoned – to 20,000 participants in 1980 – and today offers about 8000 programs in 90 countries. Next year, for example, a Hulbert Elderhostel group will begin at Fort Crown Point and trace the route of Rogers’ Rangers’ 1759 raid on Odanak, Quebec, and see how much history depends upon who writes it.

The folks here this week have been learning about the Appalachian Trail, and hiking nearby portions of it as it rises from the Connecticut Valley and engages the White Mountains. On 2222-foot Moose Mountain they looked east toward the higher peaks and heard the story of the 1968 crash of a commuter airliner on its approach to Lebanon. On 2900-foot Mount Cube they gazed at the spine of the Green Mountains; marveled at the effortless soaring flight of a turkey vulture, finding updrafts only a few hundred feet away at eye level; and learned about glacial striae, chatter marks, and glacial polish on the glass-hard rock of the summit. At 4800 feet on Mount Moosilauke they entered the alpine zone for the first time, amid plants stranded there after the last glaciation, and saw the foundation of the old hotel that once perched improbably at the very top of the mountain.

A longtime hiker displayed and explained the equipment in his day pack – map, compass, water bottle, rain clothes, butane lighter, whistle, headlamp. Another discussed no-trace camping and sanitation; another, how to warm up and hike and climb with minimum muscle stress in order to conserve energy and prevent leg cramps during the ensuing night.

A couple of former thru-hikers on the staff talked about the history of the trail’s gradual march to nearly complete protection, and about the people who every year set out to walk its entire length: why they do it, how they do it, what they carry with them, and how they get their unique trail names. September being quite late in the season for thru-hikers, they met only one: a retired Navy physician trail-named Slow & Steady, who nevertheless gently overtook one group on its way up Mount Cube and disappeared into the brush on the long trail to Mount Katahdin.

Most of all, though, the week – for me, at least – has been about people. Elderhostelers tend to be among the best and brightest of senior citizens. The group at the Hulbert Center this week are almost all retirees (and all, I think, younger than I). There are retired nurses, teachers, and school principals; a Bulgarian-American engineer whose strength, balance, and conversation are outstanding; a former administrator at the Government Accounting Office; and at least two social workers. A couple of well-placed questions at any point can evoke a half-hour story.

Elderhostel guidelines for instructors caution against discussion of politics or religion and the use of profanity or off-color jokes. But in the middle of the biggest banking crisis in almost eighty years, the early-morning newspaper hounds were vitally interested in the negotiations in Washington, the solutions proposed by various politicians, and the reasons for the crisis. Listening to the conversations around me, I enjoyed a wide spectrum of informed opinions that I wouldn’t have heard anywhere else nearby. Mixed in with laments about “hot spots” on heels, arthritic joints, and the safest and most effective pain relievers, were impromptu seminars on economics, governance, and education. I almost felt that I ought to be paying tuition, too.