Most weeks, Benny the Bolt can be found dancing on the sidelines at Cranston East high school football games, throwing up his hands to rally the crowded stands to cheer. But last week, Benny was cold, covered with dried grass and mud, 13,000 feet up on the side of a mountain in central Europe. He has since returned to the mild late summer clime of Cranston. Another school year is about to begin. Soon the stands will fill, a new team of young Cranstonians will jog onto the field, and Benny will resume his sideline duty, the cheering and dancing and the rallying. But will a faraway look ever steal over his eyes, a frostbitten memory of one gale-swept ravine, clinging to the guide rope with numb fingers as scythes of alpine air rake at his undaunted smirk?

Five years ago, Command Sergeant Major Moises Moniz retired from the army. He had a long and fruitful career, which began the year his family immigrated to East Providence from Portugal, in 1981. Moniz was 17 years old, entering 12th grade, and still struggling to grasp English when he joined the Army. He says he was thinking of his father, who had died three years earlier, and his belief that everyone should participate in the military to learn how to better themselves. Over the course of the next 38 years, Moniz would prove his ability to train himself and others as he took on a number of roles—infantryman, paratrooper, special forces engineer, senior enlisted advisor---and was deployed to Panama, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

He has a penchant for difficult and risky undertakings—static line jumps, HALO and HAHO jumps, the grueling year-long Special Forces training regimen with its 64% attrition rate. But none of these prepared him for retirement.

Keeping busy was not the issue—Moniz had already lined up a job as the JROTC Army Instructor at Cranston East, and he filled his weekends with volunteer work. The issue may have been that he was too busy: three teenage daughters, plus the workload, and then an unexpected tragedy. Things reached a limit earlier this year when his sister, who he used to speak to every day on the phone, suddenly passed away.

Moniz sat down with an old army buddy of his when summer came and school went out of session.

“He said, you have a lot going on in your mind. I’m going on this trip, why don’t you come with me?” says Moniz.

The trip in question was the Tour Du Mont Blanc, a difficult 103-mile route that passes through France, Italy, and Switzerland. The route circles the Mont Blanc group of mountains, and its steep trails traverse more than 30,000 feet of gain/loss of elevation. Most people complete the route in 9 to 12 days, though Moniz, 58, prefaces this by saying some people do it in as few as six. He and the others agreed to attempt it in nine. The rigor of the proposed adventure excited him, and he agreed to go along so long as he could bring a friend of his own: Benny, the mascot of the Cranston East Thunderbolts.

“My idea was, I’ll take him with me on the trip, and I’ll strap him onto my backpack, and any time I get to talk about our school, I’ll do that, and I’ll take pictures along the way at different places,” Moniz says.

He says other faculty going on trips could also take Benny, and maybe at the end of the year there could be a slide presentation with photos of Benny in various locales, maybe a map of all the countries Benny visited that year, and some kind of social media presence documenting Cranston East’s world-traveling mascot.

A teacher known for her crafts, Stacey Campbell, made a custom Benny the Bolt out of sponge and felt for the occasion, which Moniz strapped to the back of his pack for the first day of the trek.

It was an inauspicious start; the three hikers had decided to carry tents and sleeping gear in each of their packs, not knowing whether they would be able to reach lodgings each night. The added weight forced one of their party to drop out at the end of the first day. Moniz and his partner were struggling, too, surprised at how steep the trail was, but pressed on.

The pictures show Benny in the foreground of astonishing views of Mont Blanc and the surrounding plains, his knowing grin intact. He’s there, beaming, as Moniz scales a ladder or sidles along a narrow shelf on the face of a mountain. The stubby green lightning bolt coursed through the forbidding spires of rock that once loomed over shepherds scurrying their flocks through the mountain passes. Moniz was worried about losing Benny, but the Tour du Mont Blanc was no match for the Bolt.

“He really survived, after so many trails and so many miles that he rode on the back of the pack,” Moniz says.

The focus the trail required was a balm for Moniz as well.

“You literally have to watch your step every step of the way. There are very loose rocks, and slopes, and boulders. You have to hang on to the sides of the mountain sometimes—there’s vertical ladders you have to climb,” Moniz says. “But that kind of took my mind off everything else, made me focus on the moment.”

Poor cell signal and no wifi access helped to immerse Moniz in the trail. So did meeting people along the way. (It turns out these walks are quite social, as Moniz explains, because you usually end up running into the same people at campsites, transportation stops, water fountains, etc.) The pair kept in touch with a Canadian couple they met on their first day over email throughout the course of their diverging paths around the Mont Blanc massif. Benny was a helpful conversation starter, too.

“I did meet other people that were teachers, and I would always tell them the story about Benny,” Moniz says.

By the end of the sixth day, they had made up so much time they could afford to set a more leisurely pace for the remaining three days. Meanwhile, photos Moniz had sent to the Principal of Cranston East, Tom Barbieri, started appearing online. When Moniz finally returned, with Benny (who Moniz is still alarmed not to have on his backpack), there were students ready to barrage him with questions about his trip. When school starts up again in a couple weeks, he expects more questions to come. There is one question, though, that matters the most to him: Where next?