Reno Taini has been many things: safari guide in east Africa, explorer-biologist in Mexico, rope-climbing instructor in countries as far-flung as Myanmar and northern Ireland. Closer to home, he’s the teacher who, while looking down over a Peninsula graveyard from a school district office, coined the phrase, “It’s good to be alive in Colma,” the town where the vast numbers of dead people in cemeteries greatly outnumber those still walking the earth.

But what the pioneering educator remains most proud of are his nearly four decades taking troubled and at-risk Bay Area youngsters out into the world, mostly into nature for hiking, backpacking, trail-building, and rope-climbing, but also inside an infamous prison, and, carrying meals, into the homes of people dying from AIDS. Kids learned to

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