The only way we can get through this is if we work together
In Newark, New Jersey, a Benedictine preparatory school has spent more than five decades sending its youngest students into the Appalachian wilderness — not as an elective, but as a requirement. The five-day, 55-mile trek is designed not for comfort but for consequence, built on the belief that genuine difficulty, shared among people who must rely on one another, shapes something in a young person that no classroom can replicate. In an age that tends to smooth the path before the child, St. Benedict's Preparatory School is quietly insisting that the path itself is the lesson.
- Freshmen with no hiking experience are sent into the backcountry for five days and 55 miles — not as volunteers, but as a condition of enrollment at St. Benedict's Prep.
- The program deliberately fragments knowledge across team roles so that no single student can survive the trail alone, forcing genuine interdependence among near-strangers.
- Rain is not a problem to be avoided but a feature to be embraced — administrators believe discomfort is the very mechanism through which resilience is built.
- By the hike's end, students emerge with destroyed shoes, exhausted bodies, and something harder to measure: the lived knowledge that they can be trusted and can trust others.
- School leaders frame the tradition as a direct counterweight to helicopter parenting, arguing that removing obstacles from children's lives may be the greater danger.
At St. Benedict's Preparatory School in Newark, New Jersey, becoming a freshman means one thing above all else: you will walk 55 miles on the Appalachian Trail, over five days, whether you have ever hiked before or not. The tradition is 53 years old and entirely mandatory — not a field trip, not an elective, but a rite of passage baked into the school's identity.
Preparation begins in early spring, when incoming freshmen train together and are sorted into structured teams. Each team has a captain, navigators, cooks, a camp specialist, and a medic. Every student is trained in their role — and only their role. The design is deliberate: no one person holds enough knowledge to carry the group alone. A navigator cannot cook. A medic cannot lead. The only path forward is cooperation among people who, months earlier, were strangers.
Administrator Glenn Cassidy describes the program with a kind of philosophical calm. He welcomes rain. He welcomes hardship. The point, he explains, is not to make the experience pleasant but to make it real — to give students a memory of genuine difficulty they can return to when adult life inevitably delivers its own rainy days.
When the freshmen finish the trail each May, the visible evidence is worn-out shoes and bone-deep exhaustion. But the school measures success differently: in the fact that students completed something hard together, that they learned to depend on others and to be dependable in return. In an era defined by the impulse to clear every obstacle from a child's path, St. Benedict's has spent half a century doing the opposite — and calling it education.
In Newark, New Jersey—a city where most people know the Appalachian Trail only as a name in a geography textbook, if at all—St. Benedict's Preparatory School sends its freshmen into the wilderness for five days and 55 miles. It is not optional. It is not a field trip. It is a requirement, and it has been for 53 years.
Many of these students have never hiked before. Some have never camped. They arrive at the trailhead carrying backpacks, uncertainty, and the weight of a tradition that the school's administrators believe is nearly unique in American education. Glenn Cassidy, an administrator at St. Benedict's, told CBS News he would wager money that no other high school in the country runs a program quite like this one—sending teenagers into the backcountry with what he calls "some adult supervision," a phrase he delivered with a wry smile that suggested he knew how it sounded to parents listening in.
The school does not simply drop students on the trail. Beginning in early spring, freshmen train together, building fitness and learning to function as a unit. When the actual hike arrives, they are organized into smaller teams, each with a specific structure: a captain, a camp specialist, navigators, cooks, and medics. Every student receives training in their assigned role. But here is the deliberate design flaw: no single person knows everything required to survive the five days. A navigator cannot cook. A cook cannot navigate. The medic cannot lead. This is intentional. "The idea is that they have to rely on one another," Cassidy explained. "The only way we can get through this is if we work together and make it there."
One student preparing for the hike last month articulated what the school was trying to teach: "We'll learn how to work together in different ways and finish the task at hand." It sounds simple until you are tired, hungry, and miles from anywhere, dependent on people you barely knew three months earlier.
The school does not wait for perfect weather. In fact, administrators prefer rain. Cassidy spoke about this with the tone of someone who has thought deeply about suffering and its purpose. "When life gets difficult, it's something you can refer back to," he said. "There's a lot of rainy days in life." The hike, in other words, is not meant to be pleasant. It is meant to be real.
By May, when the freshmen finished their trek, they had become sophomores in more than name. Some bore bruises. All carried exhaustion in their bones. Their shoes were destroyed. But the school's real measure of success was not visible in any of that. It was in the fact that they had completed something genuinely difficult together, that they had learned they could depend on people and be depended upon, that they had faced a challenge that did not come with a participation trophy or a safety net. In an era when parenting often means removing every obstacle from a child's path, St. Benedict's was doing something radically different: it was placing obstacles in front of them and trusting them to find their way across.
Notable Quotes
The idea is that they have to rely on one another. The only way we can get through this is if we work together and make it there.— Glenn Cassidy, St. Benedict's administrator
When life gets difficult, it's something you can refer back to. There's a lot of rainy days in life.— Glenn Cassidy, on why the school prefers challenging weather conditions
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does a school in the middle of Newark, of all places, insist on sending kids into the wilderness?
Because Newark is exactly why. These students live in a city. They know concrete and traffic lights. The school believes they need to know something else about themselves—what they're capable of when everything familiar is gone.
But couldn't they learn that in a classroom?
Not the same way. A classroom teaches you about teamwork. The trail teaches you that you cannot eat unless someone cooks, cannot find your way unless someone navigates, cannot survive unless everyone shows up.
What if a student simply refuses to go?
The school calls it mandatory. I don't know of exceptions being made, but the real question is why anyone would refuse once they understand what it actually is—not punishment, but a genuine test.
The administrator mentioned preferring rain. That seems almost cruel.
It's the opposite of cruel. It's honest. Rain is part of life. Difficulty is part of life. The school is saying: we're not going to protect you from that. We're going to teach you to move through it.
Do the students actually change after this?
That's what the school believes. They point to the fact that students finish. They finish tired and sore and transformed, but they finish. And they know they did it together.