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Lily Canter

It was the dead of night, four days into a journey to trek 5,699 kilometres (3,541 miles) across America alone, when hiker Jessica Guo realised a mountain lion was following her.
She first saw its glowing eyes close to the only water source for dozens of kilometres – one she would have liked to use to refill her supplies.
She had nowhere to hide.
“What you’re supposed to do when you see a mountain lion is talk to them very directly and aggressively. You want to back away, facing them and keep talking,” says Guo, who is now back home in Seattle, in the US state of Washington.
For two hours, she spoke nonstop to the cat as it followed her through the woods, before it eventually turned away. She deliberately walked at night again the next day, to ensure fear did not win.

That resilience is how Guo became the first woman to hike a continuous route linking the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) in the United States with the Great Divide Trail (GDT) in Canada, following the spine of the Rockies from the Mexican border to remote Kakwa Lake in British Columbia.
Quitting her six-figure consultancy job, she spent 152 days hiking solo, often covering almost 50km a day in extreme conditions.
“I felt the life that I was going down was not the life that I wanted. I was at a junction point of either: you stay in this role and work your way towards becoming a partner, or you leave and go do something else, and that’s what I decided was right for me,” she says.
Growing up in Seattle, Guo, the daughter of Chinese parents from Shanghai and Ningbo, was always closely connected to the outdoors. As a teenager, a Girl Scouts trip to Costa Rica became a turning point.
“It was really formative for me. That was my first time being in the outdoors for an extended period of time. I learned you could do these kinds of ‘through hikes’ [hiking a long trail end to end in one go]. That’s where I heard about the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide Trail.”

The idea of walking home to Washington from the Mexican border lodged quietly in her mind and stayed there when she moved to New York for university and work.
Finding it increasingly hard to access nature, she began taking holidays and breaks to hike while working as a consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, now known as PwC, backpacking in Patagonia, the US state of Wyoming and Switzerland.
The hiking trips also showed her that the strength and clarity she felt on trails were missing from her office life. She took a six-month leave of absence to hike the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), then later used medical leave to walk the Colorado Trail while recovering from serious depression.

After hiking the PCT, she wrote in an Instagram post: “Post-trail depression is real. On trail, you release endorphins daily: walking all day in the wild, fresh air – the most human way to move. You walk with purpose. Returning to ‘life’ felt stale: it was a monumental break-up. One day it’s your whole life, the next you’re completely unmoored, finding your footing in the structured world you gave up for five months.
“Everything reminded me of the trail. It wasn’t a vacation you come back from; it was a life you adopted. Returning is a death, in a way.”
On returning to the trails, she wrote: “I’m not through this depression yet, but I’m excited to return to [the] trail and meet myself again. Funny how a narrow strip of earth changes your life.”
During her PCT adventure, she had impaled her calf on a branch and needed six stitches to close the wound. She needed three more after an accident in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Fellow hikers gave her the trail name “Stitches”.












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By the time she began planning the CDT-GDT link-up, she had the experience and stamina to walk for up to 17 hours a day.
Her route stitched together trails from New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert through the snow-strewn high passes of Colorado, the windswept basins of Wyoming, the Idaho-Montana border country and, finally, into the steep climbs of Canada’s provinces of Alberta and British Columbia.
Food became her fuel and insurance against injury.
“I was trying to eat over 3,500 calories a day, and closer to 4,000 towards the end.” That meant three meals and a stream of snacks, with several days of food in her pack at any given time.

On trail, she fought through deep, slushy snow with no sign of a path, wore heavy snowshoes, kicked platforms into steep slopes and developed an overuse injury in the tendon at the front of her ankle.
Wyoming brought vicious mosquitoes that forced her into a head net and long sleeves despite the heat. Later, there were daily summer thunderstorms along exposed ridge lines, and rain-drenched plants that turned every overgrown section into a “car wash”.
Black bears, moose and caribou wandered around her, reminding her she was moving through someone else’s home.
A particular highlight was crossing the Wind River Range in Wyoming on a high route with no trail at all. Guo navigated by map, the first human through that season, her tracks the only ones in the snow.
“It really feels like you’re truly in the back country. There’s no barrier between you and the wilderness.”












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On day 114 of her trek, at the northern terminus of the CDT, she reached the Canadian border on her 30th birthday: August 12. The celebration was simple: Oreos, a border monument and then more miles.
Online, tens of thousands of people were following along as she posted daily one-minute videos – with the help of her brother – reflecting on family, fear and the decisions that had brought her there.
“The authenticity, the rawness, the vulnerability – that’s what people have said really drew them to my story,” she says.
Her trek ended on September 19, at the northern terminus of the Great Divide Trail, at the Kakwa Lake terminus marker for the 54th parallel in Kakwa Provincial Park in British Columbia.

She walked another 14km out to the trailhead the next day, to embrace her parents who had come to drive her home.
Guo faced the familiar crash of post-trail depression on her return. “You’ve developed this lifestyle and identity when you’re on trail for five months, and then you come back to reality.”
She missed the endorphins of all-day movement and the deep trail friendships, but this time she was determined not to squeeze herself back into a corporate mould.
She aims to set herself up as a freelance consultant, combining this with trail coaching and content creation. What she wants most is to empower others.
“If you have a dream, you should go for it, because nobody’s going to let you have that dream unless you go out and take it for yourself.”

Her next personal challenge is already pencilled in: an attempt to beat the women’s self-supported record time on the Colorado Trail, the route that once helped pull her out of depression.
And this time, she will be prepared for mountain lions.
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Jessica Guo quit her job to hike across America. Her trek ended on September 19, at the northern terminus of the Great Divide Trail, at the Kakwa Lake terminus marker for the 54th parallel in Kakwa Provincial Park in British Columbia, Canada. Photo: Jessica Guo

Guo became the first woman to hike a continuous route linking the Continental Divide Trail in the United States with the Great Divide Trail in Canada. Photo: Joseph Scheller Photography / courtesy of the Montana Standard

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Guo treks through a mountain forest on her solo trek, carrying everything she needs on her back. Photo: Jessica Guo 

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Jessica Guo became the first woman to hike a continuous route linking the Continental Divide Trail with the Great Divide Trail


Jessica Guo became the first woman to hike a continuous route linking the Continental Divide Trail with the Great Divide Trail.


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How hiking 5,700km solo across America put life into perspective for young consultant

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Jessica Guo became the first woman to hike a continuous route linking the Continental Divide Trail with the Great Divide Trail

Jessica Guo became the first woman to hike a continuous route linking the Continental Divide Trail with the Great Divide Trail