The journey that Zelzin Aketzalli is on could take 50 years—or even longer—but she’s not daunted. In 2019, she became the first Mexican to complete hiking’s Triple Crown (the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide Trails), and the 31-year-old immediately dreamed up an even more ambitious project: developing the first national trail system in her home country. The inaugural installment is a prospective 1,300-mile trail across Baja California, which Aketzalli has mapped out across a trailless expanse of mountains, desert, canyons, and beach.

Aketzalli says her experiences thru-hiking the Triple Crown helped her discover her true passion for long-distance trekking. Though she was already an accomplished athlete when she logged her first mile on the PCT, she had spent more time on a bike than on her feet.

Aketzalli grew up in Iztapalapa in Mexico City, the most densely populated neighborhood in one of the world’s most densely populated cities. From the outside, it might not seem like an ideal setting for someone who loved the outdoors, but Aketzalli’s father, a multisport athlete who had been a respected alpinist in the 1980s, trained her in several sports. Some of her earliest memories are of her father waking her at 5 a.m. to go running before he took her and her brother to school on his bike.

As a kid, Aketzalli was drawn to skateboarding, and sought her first job at the age of 11 in a tianguis, one of Mexico City’s open-air markets, to pay for skate shoes and save up money for college. She took swimming lessons, and in high school, she joined the rowing team. But her eyes were always pulled toward the mountains in the distance, the peaks of volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl practically calling her name.

It wasn’t long before she took up mountain biking and began setting the kinds of ambitious goals that would come to define her adventuring career. She competed in a national mountain biking competition after training alone on the trails.

Aketzalli was a phenom on the bike, but she soon became aware of its limits. “When you’re riding, you’ve got to stick to where the bike can go,” she says. “I’d pass all these paths that drew my attention. I always had the curiosity to go beyond, and on the bike, I couldn’t do it.”

Aketzalli realized that while she loved cycling, it wasn’t her passion. “I didn’t see myself doing this day after day,” she says. She graduated with a degree from the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico’s most prestigious engineering school. But that, she says, was just a strategic goal: “I hadn’t found my calling.”

Her calling wasn’t far away, and she’d discover it thanks to two unexpected people: cyclists from the United States who’d ridden from California to Mexico City. “I took them out to see the city. I wanted to show them the mountains, and maybe I said something about wanting to go deeper, beyond where I could reach with my bike,” she recalls. “And they said, ‘Did you know there’s a trail that crosses the whole United States?’”

The encounter lit a spark in her. She’d already seen the movie Wild, based on Cheryl Strayed’s memoir by the same name, but hadn’t realized the scale of the trail it depicted. She went back to watch the film again. This time, she paid attention to the trail, its signage, the distances, and its challenges. It was November 2016. By April 2017, she was on the PCT.

Aketzalli trained in the months leading up to her first thru-hike, but her training faced lots of obstacles. She had never experienced snow before, so to prepare, she began hiking 17,159-foot Iztaccíhuatl, eager to learn how to use an ice axe and crampons. But she never got the chance: It was March, and conditions were dry. While summiting Iztaccíhuatl, she also discovered she was afraid of heights. And then, she realized she had another fear to confront.

“I wasn’t afraid of getting lost on the Pacific Crest Trail,” she says, “but I was afraid I wouldn’t know how to ask for help if I needed it.” At the time, she didn’t speak English beyond a few words.

Ultimately, none of those fears stopped her: “I learned English while hiking,” she says, thanks to a combination of Google Translate, hand gestures, and a series of notebooks, where other hikers drew maps and images of landmarks for her.

The PCT—her first thru-hike—was transformative, and by the time she finished the Sierra, she knew she had found her calling. Along the way, Aketzalli had heard hikers talk about the Triple Crown, and she decided to make it her next goal. Between 1994 and the end of 2024, only 775 hikers achieved Triple Crown status. Aketzalli soon became one of them, and the first Mexican. She finished the last of the 7,910 cumulative miles in September 2019.

By the time she reached the AT, Aketzalli was already contemplating another project: building a national trail system in Mexico. When she talked to people in Mexico, “I could see they were as amazed as I had been that trail systems existed … and I felt there was a need to have that in Mexico,” she says. “I just had to figure out where and how.”

As she hiked, Aketzalli thought back to an earlier trip she’d taken to the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí when she was 18 years old.

“I saw this mountain that really called my attention and I wanted to go there,” she says. But upon arriving, she learned that she’d have to pay someone from the community to guide her. “I was self-confident and I was a student, so I didn’t have money, so I said, ‘I can go on my own.’” The community was clear: no guide, no hike. At first, it frustrated her, but the experience led to a life-changing conversation that’s shaping the way she thinks about the national trail system she’s now designing.

“The man told me, ‘My kids left here for the city because they didn’t like the country … They don’t want anything to do with this place because there’s nothing here,’” Aketzalli recalls. “‘But this is my heritage, it’s my land.’” He explained to Aketzalli that most people don’t want to leave their communities, but they don’t have a way to support themselves. She suddenly understood the need for paid guides leading visitors like her.

“I understood that it was important to create income in this community,” she says. “Because I’m from a poor background, that stayed in my mind.”

In 2020, as Aketzalli was mapping out the route for the first trail in what she envisions as a national system, that experience kept coming back to her. She wants to be sure that the trails she designs benefit everyone, especially Mexicans and Latin Americans, particularly “the ones who can’t come to the U.S. to do trails.” But the other main goal is to ensure that the trail supports local communities, so that rural residents—especially those that are Indigenous—don’t have to leave their land.

This month, Aketzalli will begin formally scouting the new trail. She says that it could be decades before the route is complete.

“There’s nothing right now where this trail will be,” says Aketzalli. The trail will cross 1,300 miles of terrain, featuring ocean, mountain, and desert landscapes, and it will run from the Mexico-U.S. border in Baja California Norte all the way to the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula. “It’s all wild. It’s bush-walking,” she says. “We are starting from zero, from nothing. It’s a long process.”

If designing and building a trail is a massive undertaking in any country, it is a project that faces unique challenges in Mexico. For one, Aketzalli notes, thru-hiking as a concept is not part of the country’s collective consciousness, and importing an idea and a term that originated in the U.S. is fraught, particularly in this political moment.

Furthermore, Aketzalli wants to ensure that visiting hikers treat communities along the trail with the utmost respect.

“These people have lived here for generations,” she says. “They have so much culture, and we want the route to highlight their culture, but always with the idea that we [hikers] are there to learn from them, not we’re there to teach them something. This is a key part of the trail—to learn about the history of Mexico and to learn from native communities.”

In addition to cultural immersion, Aketzalli’s trail will feature what every thru-hiker lives for: physical challenges and access to nature.

“When one talks about Baja, they think of the beach,” she says. “But Baja is so much more than that. It has natural riches that are so diverse: It has snow-capped mountains. It has canyons. It has desert … It has so much nature and animal life that exists nowhere else.”

So far, in her initial scouting expeditions, Aketzalli has garnered support from communities where the proposed trail will pass through. It’s a route she mapped out during the pandemic and one she intends to walk in full this fall. She understands that, at the end of the day, it will inevitably look much different than her vision. For one, she says, communities may change their minds about whether and how they want to be involved, and she will always respect their wishes. For another, there are the usual obstacles associated with trail-building anywhere in the world: permits, land use rights, logistics, money.

But for now, Aketzalli says, this project is all about putting one foot in front of the other and overcoming obstacles as they appear, just as she did on the Triple Crown. Her goal this fall is to prove that building Mexico’s first national trail—however far in the future it may be—is within reach.

“So many people say it’s impossible,” she says. “We have to demonstrate that it is possible. I want to see more Mexicans thru-hiking. I believe wholly that a trail changes lives. I want to change the history of Mexico.”