Students who choose to be involved in Walkabout have the opportunity to rock climb, kayak, trail run, and hike as their sport in the afternoons and/or during outdoor trips each weekend and break. Walkabout adventures range from a simple day hike on the Cumberland Trail to kayaking in Patagonia or India.
What is Walkabout?
Walkabout is an outdoor program that inspires Baylor students to be adventurous. Backpacking, rock climbing, and kayaking are vehicles to explore the natural world and foreign cultures in a unique way. Outdoor adventure is Walkabout's tool for creating a personal search for grace, composure, fellowship, awareness, and reflection.
The aborigines of Australia customarily honor the tradition of adolescents going off into the wilderness to search for added meaning in their lives and for assistance in the struggle through the transitional stage of growing into adulthood. This wandering is called WALKABOUT. Baylor's outdoor program shares this name because we utilize the wilderness to create non-competitive opportunities for students to challenge themselves and share adventures with their teachers and each other.
For a graduate’s perspective on a Walkabout alumni expedition, read Tea in Sikkim by Tim Laramore.
For a student's perspective on Walkabout adventure, read Ben Aiken's Senior speech.
Walkabout trips include backpacking on the Appalachian Trail, kayaking in Panama , and kayaking in India.
(For more information on our trips for this year, go to the Spring 2014 schedule.)
Walkabout student instructors - Our Best Teachers
Senior Trip
Since 1975, the Baylor Senior Trip to Camp Chatuga in Mountain Rest, S.C. has been the cornerstone of the Walkabout program. Our seniors spend the last seven days of their Baylor careers together on a wilderness adventure.
(click here for more information on the Senior Trip)
“Walkabout views the outdoors not as an escape from academia, but as a limitless classroom and, for some students, an integral part of a Baylor educational experience."
– Tim Williams, director of Walkabout/history teacher
Afternoon Walkabout - Athletic Role
Afternoon Walkabout is a non-competitive sport that is available to all upper school students. We meet four days a week and are involved in off campus activities until 6:30 or 7:00 each evening. Days can be long and strenuous. Expect to be exhausted, dirty, and smiling at the end of each day. Cuts, bruises, and poison ivy are part of the joy of being outside. Expect all three.
(click here for sign-up procedure)
Activities include:
•trail running
•hiking
•rock climbing
•rappelling
•bouldering
•learning about rock climbing equipment and rope technique
•kayaking/canoeing
The Joe Key Award was initiated for the purpose of honoring Baylor students of admirable character whose selfless efforts might otherwise go unrecognized by the school or by their peers. Each year a group of students is nominated by students, staff, and faculty and selected by committee to travel to Silverton Colorado for eight days of backpacking and mountaineering.
Walkabout
making Baylor students uncomfortable since 1976
For a student’s perspective, click on this link to a Baylor Notes article by Ethan Mosley.
With the addition of boarding students and the transition into upper school, the freshman year is a pivotal time in developing relationships with classmates, faculty, and older students. During the Freshman Trip to Camp Alpine in Mentone, Alabama , thirty-five older students guide the freshman class through two days and nights of outdoor adventures, square dancing, and most importantly – the profound opportunity to relax together.
Walkabout student instructors seize the opportunity to experience the responsibility of being teachers. Our student instructors become aware of their ability to view themselves as role models worthy of being emulated. Walkabout instructors are chosen based on their ability to teach their classmates, their expertise in a particular discipline, and most importantly, their desire to share their passion for the outdoors.
(more information on Walkabout student instructors ).
What could you do in a year with Walkabout? click here for video
