I used to lead a backpacking program for troubled youth (not criminal offenses, mostly from abusive or dysfunctional home situations.) More than once, I've had the "I can't do this" discussion. Sometimes the reason was purely physical, but sometimes it was simply the physical exertion that broke down some mental barrier, and the teenager would have an emotional breakthrough - that was why I had professional counselors as co-leaders.

Sounds like you did everything right with the first young lady. You helped reduce her load, but didn't eliminate it. Then you explained to her what was really going on - sometimes the fear of not knowing is more debilitating than the actual physical effort needed.

There are times when you have to take someone's pack (like you did on that October trip), but that should be an absolute last resort. By doing that, you risk giving them the impression that they failed - and that means they won't want to backpack again.

When you plan your routes, do you include some "bail-out" options? For our brand-new beginner trips, with the mixed-age groups I now help lead, we usually station a car somewhere around the halfway point of the trail (in a parking lot that has a quarter-mile access trail), and at our first overnight camp (a frontcountry site with drive-in access, in case someone needs to lighten a load - or, in rare cases, be evacuated.)

The groups I now lead are mixed-age adults. We gather information when they register for the trip. It's not uncommon for our beginners to be overweight (some significantly so); they want to learn to backpack as part of becoming more active. They also indicate that they are signing up for a beginner trip so their next trip can be an AT section hike. In those cases, we try to manage expectations and, at some point, counsel them on less-challenging trails where they can hone their skills and work up to the physical demands of the AT.

Last summer, we led a trip with such an individual on a mid-90s weekend. We had concerns about her ability to hike under those conditions from the start; we let her try because we were using a trail that only had a few 100-200 foot elevation changes. I was walking last, as I usually do, to take charge of the "stragglers" who fall behind. By the time we'd gone a mile, this individual was a quarter-mile behind, and struggling to keep up. We were stopping for lunch at our bail-out point, about two miles from the start. My hiker was, by turns, flushed and pale, and I'm starting to get concerned about heat exhaustion. We stopped every couple of hundred yards that second mile, and finally got to the lunch stop almost an hour after everyone else. (The main leader was well into his "Leave No Trace" presentation.) I told the main leader we could not let her finish the hike, even though she said she'd be fine "if I can just rest a while." We hadn't even got to the part of the trail where the elevation started changing, and still had six miles to go. So, I evacuated her to our campsite by car. I spent the afternoon with her, specifically teaching her how to lighten her pack and talking about hiking techniques and easy trails that would let her ease into the sport at a slower pace. My main point was to convince her that she hadn't failed, and to give her strategies to make her next trip work for her.

Keep encouraging them and working with them. Also, if you don't have assistant leaders available already, work on turning some of those earlier participants into assistant leaders for your future trips. The experiences they had will make them more empathetic with the people struggling on their first trips.