In August of 1997, I was two-thirds of the way up Mount Monadnock when rain began to fall. Despite a forecast that said serious precipitation would hold off until later in the day, the wet weather had come not long after noon, making the trail a little muddy and making the boulders that I was climbing over rather slippery.

I wasn’t too worried about myself. In fact, if I were alone I might have gone on without too much thought. However, navigating the trail behind me were eight girls, all 10 and 11 years old, none with any hiking experience, proper boots for the excursion or rain gear.

As the drops fell harder, we pushed forward, and I cautioned the girls to move slowly and carefully. At the same time, I looked over at Melissa, the 18-year-old junior counselor who was assisting me on this outing. She looked back at me, and our unspoken concerns were exchanged. Things were getting a bit dangerous.

I had decided to take this particular trip to Monadnock because I was about to leave my job as program director at the Boys & Girls Club in East Boston, a place I had attended as a teenager and had gone on to work at for 13 years. I had supervised hundreds of field trips throughout the years, including a couple dozen overnight trips. We’d gone hiking, camping, skiing, canoeing, cycling, whitewater rafting, horseback riding, done ropes courses and stayed at youth hostels, in addition to the usual amusement parks and ballgames.

I took advantage of every opportunity that I could to get our club members off the streets of the city and into a different environment. Our neighborhood, isolated from the rest of Boston by the harbor and sometimes a traffic nightmare because of the proximity of Logan Airport, tended to ingrain a parochial view of the world into its offspring. I wanted the young people of the community to know that there is a whole world out there with lots of charms to offer, and it isn’t really that far away.

When I had been working at the Club long enough to organize my first camping overnight, I knew immediately that the destination would be Mount Monadnock, in southwestern New Hampshire. I had a connection to the mountain from my childhood, and I wanted to help forge that connection for others.

A summer day camp I had attended in elementary school had ended each season with an overnight to Monadnock State Park and a climb of the mountain. For four consecutive years, I navigated the white dot trail, the easiest of the routes to the summit, and on each of those hikes I never made it to the top. Our group of 50 or so became spread out, with some finishing their ascent, eating the lunches that we carried and then heading back down before I could even catch a glimpse of the view from the peak.

Every year the counselors had me turn around, and I was a little disappointed that I hadn’t completed the mission. When it was time for me to take youngsters on the climb, I promised myself that every one would reach the bald pate of the mountaintop.

Most often the trips were arranged for the teenage guys who were most involved in Club activities, but as time went on we had an increasing number of girls among our members, so they were included as well. Eventually, I also felt comfortable taking a slightly younger crowd, as I knew what I was doing and I saw even very small children out on the trail – sometimes passing me.

On every climb, each of those who came along with me sat at Monadnock’s summit, eating a sandwich and enjoying the view. Most rewarding were those who had doubted themselves along the way, sweating and straining and telling me that they couldn’t go on. Their accomplishment was something they would always remember.

When I decided that I had spent enough time working at the Club and lined up a job teaching English, I made a big deal of announcing that, in my last week as program director, I would take one final outing: a day trip to Monadnock. I also decided that the trip would be open to some of our youngest female members. They had become daily visitors to the Club and they were close to me and they adored Melissa.

As a group they weren’t very athletic and, despite my detailed list of what to bring and what not to bring, experience told me that they would all wear clothes and shoes that weren’t right for hiking and that some of them would bring a backpack with too much stuff in it, while others would expect someone else to carry their food and water on the climb.

None of this mattered. I had been up Monadnock more than a dozen times, and I had brought Club members on many of those excursions. All of them made it up and all of them made it down without injury. I was confident that this trip would be no different.

When rain started to fall lightly, I figured that the heavier stuff would hold off, as the forecast had indicated. When it started to come down steadily and unceasingly, we were just emerging from the canopy of trees that covers more than half of the trail.

I stopped, looked at the sky and then at the girls.

“We don’t want to stop,” they said, sensing what I was thinking. “We want to keep going.”

I conferred with Melissa. It began to pour.

“We’re going to head back down,” I told them. There were a couple of sighs and a tiny bit of whining, but the girls turned around and followed the trail the way they’d come. I moved quickly to the front of the group, to test the terrain, lend a hand and to stop the fall of anyone who lost their footing.

The bottom section of Monadnock’s white dot trail is a wide dirt path and it inclines relatively slowly, but the middle third is predominately rocky and significantly steeper, and climbers must make their way over large gray boulders. As most climbers know, 95% of accidents happen on the way down a mountain, where fatigue, lack of focus and gravity combine to knock people off balance.

We, of course, had a steady rain added to the equation and my contingent of young, inexperienced hikers was started to slip, one after another, as they worked themselves down the trail. This would be the only time I ever became worried on Monadnock, but worried I was. The conditions had worsened, and we still had a significant part of the difficult terrain ahead of us. I was responsible for the safety of each of those children, and I had us in a tough spot.

Slowly and carefully we moved down the mountain. Melissa and I both helped each girl over particularly difficult spots, and we kept the gang together and focused. There was some slipping and sliding, but finally we made it to the less taxing bottom third, and soon after that we emerged into the parking lot at the base.

We hopped back into the van, a wet and tired bunch, and then I pointed the vehicle east and drove off. Minutes later, the girls were begging for fast food and we stopped at Burger King.

I sat with Melissa and told her that I had been a bit scared out on the mountain. We looked over at the girls, who had by then already forgotten about the climb and were laughing and shouting and munching on fistfuls of fries.

They were the only group that I hadn’t been able to lead to the top, but I learned that day that the task is not always of my choosing, and on that wet August day eight years ago my mission had become bringing those children safely down the mountain, and I succeeded.