Woman Becomes First To Solo-Hike The American Discovery Trail

A 40-year-old woman named Briana DeSanctis is the first woman on record to hike coast-to-coast by herself on the American Discovery Trail.

“In 2015, I hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, which is just shy of 2,200 miles,” DeSanctis told weather.com in a recent interview. “And that really inspired me to become a very hardcore hiker.”

She went big. DeSanctis said her route over the American Discovery Trail covered some 6,800 miles - more than three times the length of the Appalachian Trail trek.

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Her first steps on the American Discovery Trail were in Delaware on Jan. 1, 2022. It rained the first two days, and snowed the next.

DeSanctis hiked the trail over the next two years. She walked in all four seasons, sometimes battling injury.

“I had a stress fracture and I climbed up to this high mountain in Dolly Sods, West Virginia, and there had been a substantial amount of snow,” DeSanctis said.

“I was up to my waist in snow. I was hiking through where the tree wells are, to get so I could actually walk.”

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She was caught in both a winter storm and a massive downpour in Indiana, experienced “perfect” hiking weather in the spring in Ohio and clambered over fallen tree limbs on muddy trails after a series of atmospheric rivers hit California this winter.

DeSanctis didn’t do much planning around the weather, but did equip herself for it, including changing out her bedding for winter and summer.

“I didn't realize how much the wind was going to affect my hiking,” DeSanctis said.

One day in Nebraska was particularly gusty.

“When it's coming at you from a diagonal direction and you're trying to walk down a road and you have a large backpack on full of stuff, it's blowing you sideways and my back would hurt at the end of the day because I was struggling so hard against the wind," she said.

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There were other challenges, too. At one point, DeSanctis found herself unable to climb out of a steep stretch of Water Canyon, along the trail in northern Nevada.

She sent an SOS, and members of a search and rescue team helped her walk out.

Regular citizens assisted her along the way, too. Some let DeSanctis sleep in their heated garages. Others welcomed her into church sanctuaries. She spent one night in an American Legion hall.

“People are just so welcoming and so great and I don't know if it's because of what I was doing or there are just really great people in America, but I think it's a little bit of both,” she said.

DeSanctis finished her journey on Feb. 10, stepping into the Pacific Ocean at the end of the trail in sunny Point Reyes, California.

The non-profit American Discovery Trail board confirms she was the first woman to solo-hike its entire length.

Weather.com reporter Jan Childs covers breaking news and features related to weather, space, climate change, the environment and everything in between.

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