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Jessica “Stitches” Guo began her 30th birthday alone, in the woods, walking north towards the Canadian border.

It was the same way she had spent the last few months of her 20s, during which she hiked from the Mexican border through New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana along the (CDT). This day, however, was different.

At 1:51 P.M. on August 12, Guo reached a clearing in the trees, where stone monuments marked the U.S.-Canada border and the northern terminus of the CDT. She collapsed into tears alongside some concerned tourists. When they learned what she had just done, they applauded and helped her record a video, which would be viewed by more than half a million people on and .

For a few minutes, Guo sat, welcoming her 30s with birthday-cake Oreos and taking it all in. Then, she stood and continued into Canada. Her journey was not over. In many ways, she felt as if it were just beginning.

“Up until that point, I was like, ‘There’s a chance that I might not do this.’ I might get there and be too late, or I might be too tired, or I might be too bored,” Guo says. “So for me to get there and still be feeling great, I was like, ‘All right, yeah, we can actually start the real hike now.’”

After over 2,800 miles of hiking on the CDT, Guo was now beginning her thru-hike of the 750-mile , the second phase of a linkup that only two hikers had ever completed. The somewhat obscure linkup became common knowledge to the thru-hiking internet via Guo’s daily chronicles of her journey.

Each day, Guo spoke into her phone camera: “Today is day X hiking the Continental Divide Trail and Great Divide Trail combined.” A map would pop up with a blinking pin indicating her location. Over the next minute or so, Guo shared footage of her day of hiking, accompanied by reflections on what hiking meant to her, her family, and the decisions that brought her to where she was.

“I had never really made videos before this,” Guo says. “My as I started to really have a lot of reflective time on trail. And so then it became harder and harder to try to pack it all in.”

What began as an effort to document her hike for family and friends became a powerful source of inspiration for tens of thousands of new followers. Over 153 days, Guo created a video every day documenting her progress, assisted by her brother, who posted them to social media. Guo wrote her scripts and sifted through clips each night when she set up camp. During road walks and easy sections of trail, she edited on the move, cutting a video while cars, trucks, and other hikers rushed past.

“Everybody else who was walking past me was probably like, ‘This girl is missing the whole point. She’s on her phone the whole time,’” Guo says. “I was like, ‘I’m working!’”

During her five-month journey, Guo still had plenty of time alone to soak up the Rocky Mountain scenery. In contrast with her first thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) in 2023, where she hiked with people for all but the first 10 days, this trip was strikingly solitary.

“There was pretty much nobody,” Guo says. “There were 28 days that I saw nobody, 40 days that I saw nobody on the trail, but I saw people in town or at the road or something, and I think there were 22 days where I saw one person.”

Guo set off from the Mexican border on April 21, blitzing through the heat of New Mexico to arrive at the high-elevation San Juans of southwest Colorado in mid-May, when they were still covered in snow. With a pair of newly-acquired snowshoes, Guo joined forces with Philip “Slide” Witmer, a fellow 2023 PCT hiker who is attempting a border-to-border calendar year .

“It was so fun to be able to hike with somebody who also had to keep up a similar pace,” Guo says. “It was so great to just have somebody else to talk to who was also on this trail and could relate to things that I was saying. He gave me so much beta.”

After scrambling ridgelines, climbing cornices with their ice axes, and navigating exposed traverses, the two made it through the San Juans relatively intact, but separated as Witmer pushed big miles and Guo recovered from anterior tibialis tendinitis, a result of dragging heavy snowshoes for hours every day. Still, Guo made it to Wyoming ahead of schedule, where she decided to take the high route across the Wind River Range.

In addition to the massive energy expenditure of this high route (“there was one day that I burned 4,000 calories in four miles”), Guo faced swarms of mosquitoes and flies at lower elevations that slowed her progress.

“I had a lot of mosquito bites around my face and eyes, and it just swelled up a lot,” Guo says. “I ended up going to a gas station trying to get allergy medication, but all they had was Benadryl. So, I took that, but then I was so sleepy it knocked me out.”

In Montana, Guo got “car washed” by overgrown foliage drenched in consistent rain, and crossed into Canada to find slow going, as she bushwhacked through dense forest and loose mountainsides.

“A lot of places on the GDT are not really a trail. It’s just a route,” Guo says. “It might just be like, clearly here’s the dirt that’s been disturbed on this steep slope.”

After skirting the border of Alberta and British Columbia for another month, through muddy bogs and rocky ridgelines, under Aurora-tinted night skies, Guo reached some of her lowest mental lows as she neared her finish line.

“The last week of a thru-hike is mentally the toughest week because I’m so close and I’m still not there and I want to be done,” Guo says. “I did a high route during that time as well. So I was like, my God, why did I put myself in this position where now I’m doing such slow miles? The trail is going to end in 100 miles, but I’m doing less than a mile an hour.”

But in her final days, small interactions with strangers lifted her. Two moose hunters stopped to chat with her. Two hikers gave her extra food. A pack of caribou passed through a meadow in front of her.

“Every single one of those last couple of days, I always had something that was like, ‘That was actually really great,’” Guo says. “I was like, ‘Okay, no, you know what? I am meant to be out here and finishing this hike in the way that I am.’”

Guo took one final high route alternate over Surprise Pass, a testament to how she had embraced challenges on her already monumental linkup. In a video chronicling her final day on the trail, Guo references a quote from one of her pre-trail blog posts: “I’m hiking the combined CDT and GDT because I’m truly not sure I’ll be able to, and I want to push the boundary of what I think I’m capable of. I’m hiking it because it intimidates me.”

At 10:40 A.M. on September 19, after 152 days, 3,550 miles, and 588,000 feet of elevation, Guo became the first woman on record to hike the combined CDT and GDT. The next day, her parents greeted her at the trailhead with smiles, tears, and hugs, as well as a trimmer her dad brought to clear some overgrowth on the road. It had taken some convincing to get their support for her adventures.

“I said I would be the first woman, and they were like, ‘Why do you have to be the first? Clearly there’s a reason that nobody else is doing this,’” Guo says. “But by the time I got to Wyoming, they were like, ‘Yeah, you’re really doing this thing.’ They were so proud and happy to see me, which really meant a lot to me, for them to come out and support me in person and see that I could do it on my own.”

Guo crossed back into the U.S., celebrating with her family in Washington. In the weeks since finishing, she has spent days sifting through emails, trying to decide how to best use the new opportunities associated with her platform. She hopes to give back to a hiking community that has given her so much and open the door for more hikers like her to find their purpose. Because for Guo, the trail has meant the world.

“Through the fact that I’ve been able to spend so much time on trail, I have been able to live a really rich life,” Guo says. “And I really felt that when I was thinking about my 20s as I was approaching the end of the CDT. I was like, ‘You know what? I think I’ve lived it the right way.’”