St. Benedict’s Prep backpacking experiment that takes kids from city to forest going strong after 50 years
It was an experimental idea to give freshmen a hands-on learning experience in the 1970s — send students out on the Appalachian Trail for four days. The Trail, a Benedictine backpacking tradition established in 1973 at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year and still going strong.
Students spend a full year preparing for this rite of passage, which tests their physical, mental, and spiritual endurance with a four-day, 55-mile self-led hike through the Appalachian wilderness that begins at High Point State Park and concludes at the Delaware Water Gap in northwest New Jersey.
This year, the annual trip will begin on May 20.
It all began in 1973 with two teachers and a group of 12 boys, Headmaster Father Edwin Leahy, O.S.B. told Jersey Catholic.
The school, located at 520 High Street, was closed during the 1972‐73 school year after enrollment had plummeted from 800 to just 46 students in seven years.
In 1973, the school reopened, with a brand-new vision and promise to take a less expensive and more flexible approach to education. Quoted by the New York Times in a 1973 interview, Father Edwin said that the new school would be “a small, interracial school that will seek to face what we have come to recognize as some of the educational problems of our time… the new school, will, hopefully, prepare those students for college who want to continue their education. But if some decide to become carpenters or plumbers, we hope to provide them with a valuable four‐year education.”
Inspired by American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer John Dewey and his philosophy on experiential education, which promotes the idea that learning through experiences is an important foundation in a formal educational setting, the monks at the school sought to create opportunities for boys to engage in technical internships, community service, research, and other experiential learning opportunities.
Father Edwin described the first group of boys who took the trip as “rowdy,” and said there were difficulties in finding a place for these boys to complete their experiential learning requirements. The idea for the Appalachian Trail trip, which would later become known as “The Trail,” arose out of a desperate requirement to get the rabble-rousers off campus and into the world.
Something happened during that first four-day journey that changed the boys, according to Father Edwin. Navigating blindly through unfamiliar terrain and faced with elemental hurdles such as rainstorms and muddy trails, the boys were required to work as a team with their fellow classmates and teachers to survive. “It is an absolute miracle that we all came back, that first trip,” Father Edwin remarked.
The teachers at Saint Benedict’s quickly realized that there was a lot of potential and benefits with the Appalachian trail trip, and the hike would set the school apart from other preparatory schools in the area. By the next year, completion of the hike was a mandatory requirement for all freshmen class members.
That year, Father Mark Payne, O.S.B., a Benedictine monk, joined the Saint Benedict’s staff as a physics teacher and is credited with transforming the nature of the hike into “The Trail” that students and alumni know and love. Payne, who was an experienced outdoorsman and Boy Scout Troop Leader, developed the Group System, which the school still uses to this day, to delegate tasks such as cooking, navigating, first aid, and building shelter to individual students. The system also splits students into functional groups of eight and staggers their release on to the Appalachian Trail at intervals to avoid crossing one another’s paths.
Fifty years ago, Father Edwin said, there was no way to imagine how impactful the program would become for both the school and the students who have participated in it.
“In that first year, we were not even sure if the school would still be there,” he said. “There was no way of imagining the future of the project and what it would become… God just put together a group of people who could take ideas and make them real in a brief period.”
Alumni have returned to Saint Benedict’s to share stories about how The Trail changed their lives.
“You can talk to people who walked The Trail 40 years ago, and they still know the names of the other seven men who walked with them,” he said.
He recounted the story of an alumni whose entire trail group attended his father’s funeral —a full eight years after graduating from the school — a testament to the strong bonds created between the students during the project.
A full year of preparation goes into the trip. The journey begins during the Freshman Overnight, an orientation experience wherein all freshmen learn and buy in to Saint Benedict’s ethos of community, student leadership, counseling, and experiential education. The experience lasts a full week and includes students attending school, completing orientation activities, and sleeping each night on the gym floor.
During that week, students are assigned to their trail group; the eight fellow classmates they will eventually travel with through the Appalachian wilderness in the spring of their freshman year. They also learn The Trail mantra, “Stay Together,” a term coined by Father Payne, which helps the freshmen through challenges they encounter while navigating the Appalachian Mountains trails.
“The mantra… becomes crucial to their experience at SBP throughout their four years here,” Father Edwin said. “It is essential to who we are, what we do, how our leadership structure works, and what we communicate to the students all the time. It’s about realizing you are responsible for one another, along with the message, ‘Whatever hurts my brother or sister hurts me. Whatever helps my brother helps me,’ which is the Saint Benedict’s motto.”
The students train formally for the journey every day for four weeks with prayer, meditation over Bible stories, and training sessions in basic camping skills. For many of the students at Saint Benedict’s, The Trail is their first experience leaving the inner city and going out to the woods, according to Father Edwin.
“We have kids who navigate dangerous blocks in the city, where ugly inhuman stuff goes on,” said Father Edwin said in an interview with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy for the short film “Stay Together.” “But take them out on the trail, and it’s dark and it’s silent, which are things that people who live in the city never experience. And kids will tell you – they’ll get mad at you – it scares the heck out of them.”
The more obstacles the students face along their journey, the better their experience is, Father Edwin said. “When it rains and their feet are wet, that is how you tell the metal of these kids.”
To acclimate students to the outdoor experience of camping overnight, a three-day practice hike is held at the Benedictine Abbey property in Sandyston, N.J.
During the journey, each student keeps a journal to document their experiences. Every morning the groups meet in formation to pray together. The story of Exodus is read to the students as they prepare for their journey and throughout the hike.
“This experience taught me a lot,” said Kaleb Hassell, a current sophomore at Saint Benedict’s, who also serves as a Freshmen Counselor and Admissions Team Leader. “It taught me how to survive in an environment that I’m not used to being in. It also taught me to – as we say at Benedict’s – ‘be comfortable in the uncomfortable,’ to be taken out of the city and be put in the woods for a total of five days.”
The trail experience enabled him “to see, simply the beautiful thing that God created – nature. While walking the trail, I was continually reminded of the story of Creation, which is in the book of Genesis. Seeing the trees, hearing the birds and the wind, and seeing the view of valleys from high mountaintops really left me with the simple words ‘God is good.’”
Over the past 50 years, some changes have been made to the tradition of The Trail. In 2020, following the closure of adjacent schools and the advocacy of a group of determined young women who wanted to continue their education in the Benedictine tradition, Saint Benedict’s opened a Girls Prep Division. Female students also take part in the traditional hike, although boys and girls do not travel in the same groups or share tents.
Lucia Gallo, a junior in the Girls Prep Division, Freshman Leader, and Co-Head of the Admissions Team has gone on The Trail twice. “I’ve learned so much about those around me because of the time we were able to spend with each other. Walking in the woods for eight hours really gives you the chance to get to know someone,” Gallo said.
The trail experience helps participants learn to believe in themselves.
“I have learned that sometimes everyone needs a push to get started,” Gallo said, “There were many times that the girls around me didn’t believe that they were going to make it out or able to finish the day. Once they had the support of those around them, they started to believe in themselves.”
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of The Trail, alumni have organized a reunion to take place at the last stop on the trail. Alumni will greet current students as they finish their trip and relive the experience of their youth. This year, a fundraiser is also being held in honor of Father Payne, who died in 2016, and to commemorate The Trail’s 50 years.
