She left her desk job and walked 3,541 miles from Mexico to Canada: ‘Give yourself permission’ | Walking

J.Essica Guo had slept only two and a half hours on a night bus when she arrived at the Mexico-US border near Lordsburg, New Mexico, in April. Through the window, she saw a flat, shadowless landscape. The first day’s jitters made Guo wonder what she was doing there.

The former consultant had left corporate America to attempt something no woman had accomplished: a single, continuous hike of the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) and the Great Divide Trail (GDT) in one calendar year.

The rare connection of the two trails – which traverse New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert, the high passes of Colorado, Old Faithful in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park, the alpine landscape of Montana and Glacier National Park, and the remote backcountry of Banff, Canada – captivated tens of thousands of viewers online as Guo recorded and edited his daily trips, all while keeping a pace of about 30 miles (48 km) every day.

She completed the epic five-month journey in September, becoming the first female hiker to do so — and decided to quit her six-figure job for good to devote more time to helping others get on the trail.

“I didn’t start out as a crazy endurance athlete and I really consider myself a normal person,” she said of the 3,541-mile (5,698 km) hike, which has only been completed by three men since 2005. “I was afraid of sleeping outside alone in the woods or hiking alone or in the dark when I started backpacking almost a decade ago.”

His short narrated videos, which feature landscapes ranging from hot deserts to snow-capped peaks, were originally intended for family, friends and fellow hikers. But it didn’t take long for a larger community to get involved; she now has nearly 50,000 followers on her Instagram account. Guo documented her progress each day, editing on the go during the easier sections of the course, and texted the files to her brother when she had cell service so he could upload them on her behalf.

Guo, who has had 30 years on the trail, braved everything from swarms of mosquitoes to deep mud and snow, rocky ridges and dense forests (spotting bears, caribou and 193 species of birds along the way), as she gained 179,450 meters (588,747 feet) in elevation, the equivalent of 20 hikes in Everest.

On September 19, day 152, Guo reached the end of his journey by posting an emotional video from Kakwa Lake in the Rocky Mountains, British Columbia, Canada. “If there is something that concerns you, I hope you will listen to me,” she said. “Give yourself permission to do the thing.”

“It’s hard not seeing people who look like you”

Although Guo grew up in a suburb of Seattle, where she was regularly exposed to nature on hikes and camps with her family, it took her many years to allow herself to do something extraordinary.

It was during a pivotal trip to Panama after high school, which she earned by selling Girl Scout cookies, that Guo discovered the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), which stretches from the U.S. border with Mexico to the Canadian border and was made famous by Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir Wild. She loved the idea of ​​hiking in her home country, but was intimidated.

“I think a lot of women tend to underestimate what they can do and feel like we have to be overprepared,” she said. “I later realized that you don’t have to feel 100% ready to go for it. We’re not really conditioned to think that way as women.”

The percentage of women who hike and backpack has increased over the years. In 2018, women made up a third of thru-hikers — people who hike a long-distance trail end-to-end in a single expedition — but the 2024 Appalachian Trail (AT) and PCT surveys showed that nearly half of all long-distance hikers identified as women. Despite this, Guo faced “benevolent sexism” — men underestimating her abilities or acting protective — both on the track and in the comments sections of her posts. A few people on the trail seemed surprised that she was an Asian woman, and other Asian hikers told Guo they had been mistaken for her.

“I hope we have more and more diversity to the point where you don’t need to comment on that anymore,” said Guo, the daughter of Chinese immigrants. “It’s hard not to see people who look like you doing the things you want to do.”

Guo finally realized her 10-year dream of hiking the PCT in 2023. She took her trail nickname, “Stitches,” after a branch impaled her calf and she needed six stitches, and another incident involving a sharp rock where her knee received three stitches.

From post-trail depression to the trail

The joy of her accomplishment was short-lived as she soon suffered post-track depression and, later, severe clinical depression after returning to her daily life as a design strategist and facilitator at a consulting firm. “You’ve just been in this place where you’re getting dopamine every day, where you’re outside and listening to nature, and then come back to work, 9 to 5 and are sedentary,” she said. “It’s a big change.”

Her doctor told Guo she needed to get back on track to remember who she was.

Last year, she took medical leave and completed the Colorado Trail (CT) in about a month. “It was really empowering because before I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t going out. I wasn’t doing all the things that keep you alive and healthy, but those are also the things I have to do when I’m on the trail,” she said. “I have to move forward, I have to eat, I have to sleep.”

Seeing the progress she made at CT helped Guo heal from depression and find a new dream. That’s when she came up with the idea of ​​connecting the CDT and GDT, but found that there was virtually no information available about completing the two hikes. She decided to blaze her own trail and document it so future hikers could follow her lead.

Guo’s CDT and GDT hikes were largely solitary, giving him time to reflect and write about his experiences, including witnessing the effects of climate change.

In one post, Guo wrote: “I didn’t start this hike intending to talk about the climate, but it’s untenable, the effect we’re having. You might not see it in your homes because you turn on the tap and fresh, clean water comes out. And I’m at the spring and I see the glaciers shrinking. I see there’s supposed to be a glacier here, but there’s nothing. And that scares me.”

She also spoke about current threats to public lands and the Roadless Rule, which protects America’s backcountry recreation areas. “The whole point of being there is being in this isolated space,” she said, “and I think it’s worth preserving.”

When Guo saw the end of the GDT track, she was overcome with emotion and started crying.

“I thought about how I had walked along the ridgeline of North America, the source of water that feeds so many millions of people in two countries, nourishing so many millions of creatures and plants and ecosystems,” she said. “It was humbling, and when I arrived at the terminus the next day, I felt joy, relief, sorrow and pride. It was bittersweet to know that the end was here.”