Jessica Guo hiked 30 miles a day, becoming the first woman to continuously hike two historic US trails in a calendar year
J
essica Guo had only slept for two-and-a-half hours on an overnight bus when she arrived at the Mexico-US border near Lordsburg, New Mexico, in April. Out of the window she saw a flat, shadeless landscape. First-day jitters had Guo questioning what she was doing there.
The former consultant had left corporate America to attempt something no woman had completed: a single, continuous hike of the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) and the Great Divide Trail (GDT) in one calendar year.
The rare linking up of the two trails – which traverse New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert, Colorado’s high-elevation passes, Old Faithful in Yellowstone national park in Wyoming, the alpine scenery 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 her daily journeys, while keeping a pace of around 48km (30 miles) each day.
