Want to Cross an International Border on a Thru-Hike? These Trails Do it.

Not the miracle diet of walking 15 hours each day. Not the surreal experiences of being a dirtbag in trail towns. Not the camaraderie of sharing both of those things with strangers: Perhaps the most underrated aspect of long-distance hiking is watching the landscape change as you continue. Maybe it’s gradual, with southern forests slowly ceding to their heartier northern counterparts. Or maybe it’s sudden, as when the Sierra Nevada batholith seems to spring from the desert floor.

These shifts are reminders of how borders can be arbitrary or concrete, lines drawn on a map to satisfy terms of some treaty, or hard-and-fast physical features that actually separate one place from its neighbor. In the United States, you walk that concrete divide between North Carolina and Tennessee or Montana and Idaho, high in the mountains. Walk out of Wyoming and into Colorado, though, and you’ll wonder what exactly has changed—these borders are, in fact, largely just lines on a map. The same can also apply, of course, for borders between neighboring countries. (Still, bring your passport. Border information online can be ambiguous, so it’s best to be prepared.) We’ve gathered together six long thru-hikes that cross international borders while taking you between some of the most beautiful places on Earth.

The Continental Divide Trail + The Great Divide Trail / The Eastern Continental Trail

Countries: The United States and Canada

It is easy to think of the big three trails of the Triple Crown—the Appalachian, Pacific Crest, and Continental Divide—as discrete entities, massive footpaths to be completed in long hauls mostly in different years. But just because they run from Mexico to Canada or Georgia to Maine doesn’t mean the geographic features they highlight also end at the trail’s terminus. In fact, there are few demonstrations of how arbitrary borders can be more obvious than the Canadian extensions of the CDT and AT. For the former, the Great Divide Trail picks up in Waterton Lakes, the stunning national park on the other side of the Montana line. Think of the GDT as the CDT wild and amplified, with more routefinding and bushwhacking as it trudges 700 miles northwest along the divide between British Columbia and Alberta. There is even the intriguing possibility of sticking to the divide past the trail’s official terminus, into rather untrammeled terrain.

While the PCT and CDT span the southern and northern borders of the United States, the AT, of course, doesn’t stretch so far. But during the last quarter century, a handful of intrepid hikers have started their journeys at the iconic marker on Key West in Florida, cut up and across that state and through Alabama and Georgia by stitching together shorter trails, taken the AT to Katahdin, and pressed on past the border via the International Appalachian Trail all the way to the northern tip of Newfoundland. It’s a patchwork dubbed the Eastern Continental Trail. 

What’s more, that journey of 5,700 miles doesn’t have to be the end. Right now, long-distance powerhouse Lil’ Buddha is in the middle of what he’s calling the Pangea Traverse, an 18,000-mile journey to reconnect the Central Pangean Mountains by footsteps. He will, of course, have to cross the Atlantic Ocean to do it, a reminder that—assuming the scale of deep time—even transoceanic borders can seem arbitrary.

The E1 

Countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy

“Fog, briefly lifting, letting the sun through, creating a mystical atmosphere, as I leave Nordkapp at three in the morning,” wrote long-distance hiker and photographer Sandro Koster of his first day on a fresh trek in July 2020, as he headed south from the northern tip of Norway:  “Embarking into a new adventure.” 

That quest finally ended in July 2023, when he traversed Sicily, the lush pearl at Italy’s southern tip. In four summers and a sliver of a winter, Koster had walked nearly 5,000 miles from far above the Arctic Circle to the heat-shimmering waters of the Mediterranean. He had finished the E1, the monster of Europe’s labyrinthine trail network, in 219 days spread over three years. “I am,” Koster quipped, “somewhat tired.”

Apart from its length, which is roughly equal to the United States’ North Country Trail, the most striking thing about the E1 may be its diversity as it cuts through Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. Those vast, treeless expanses in the north yield to enchanting forests and blooming vistas only a bit further south in Sweden. There are the beaches, fjords, and farms of Denmark and the mountainous reaches as you near Italy through Germany and Switzerland. Through his hyper-detailed and playful account of the trail, Koster often implies that the extremes of the landscapes and the changes they bring are one of the best reasons to hike across borders. The journey never remains the same for very long.

The GR10, GR11, and Pyrenean Haute Route 

Countries: Spain, France, and Andorra

The Pyrenees Mountains are a 300-mile blockade between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe; the tallest peaks register at more 11,000 feet, but they are broad mountains, like bulwarks between neighboring valleys. Both France and Spain have used the spectacular central ridge as the backdrop for largely parallel long-distance paths that cut from the Atlantic Ocean on the west to the Mediterranean on the east, the convolutions nearly doubling the distance. (Accommodations are easily accessible.) On the northern French side, the GR10 (that is, Grande Randonnée) is an aged and well-worn footpath that is breezy enough despite its rather high cumulative climbing tally. On the Spanish side, where you’ll cut from Basque Country to high peaks through Andorra and finally to the sea, the GR11 is a bit more rugged despite the slightly shorter length.

Often running parallel less than 10 miles apart, the two trails largely keep to the shoulders of the central ridge—and so, to their respective sides of the border that the Pyrenees provides. The obvious question, then: What about a trail that traverses the mountains and the border? That would be the Pyrenean Haute Route, less a trail than a conglomeration of routes among the high granite and limestone peaks and passes, plus the alpine leaks that have accumulated there rather than far below them. Because the range runs between two bodies of water, and because you’re always moving from one side of the ridge to the other, the weather can be spectacularly variable, so that you are sometimes hiking above storms that stretch across the land below. Few routes crisscross international borders so liberally, especially in one of the world’s most fabled mountain ranges.

Via Dinarica 

Countries: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, and Macedonia

When most in the West think of Yugoslavia, they tend to think of war, whether the formation of the composite country after World War I or the series of conflagrations that ripped it apart just more than 70 years later. But look at a map and consider the coastline opposite Italy’s eastern shore, on the other side of the Adriatic Sea: That is (largely) the former Yugoslavia, a karst-rich region rippling with the Dinaric Alps, deep canyons cut into limestone, sprawls of undisturbed forest, and the remains of the historic dioramas of the world’s assorted empires. “The Balkans are a cultural and geographical kaleidoscope,” as long-distance hiker Ante Romac wrote in 57Hours. “While I grew up in Croatia, I hadn’t seen most of this before.”

Romac saw it on the Via Dinarica, a trio of roughly parallel hiking paths that each stretch 800 miles or so from Slovenia to Albania and that USAID called “the Western Balkans’ path to tourism development” after they was launched in 2010. The most common route, the White, begins near a castle built into a cave, the Predjamski grad, and rises to reach some of the region’s highest summits (all below 10,000 feet) as it crosses into Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania. Montenegro’s Durmitor National Park includes several dozen striking peaks, while the cliffs and crevices of Paklenica National Park shape a rock-climbing haven. Make friends with the locals and they may invite you in for a homemade fruit brandy called rakija or the rich, crumbly cheeses that are a regional specialty.

The Great Himalaya Trail

Countries: Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet (China)

By the time British-born adventurer Robin Boustead decided to trek to Mt. Kailash, a towering peak in western Tibet, in 2008, he had been hiking in the Himalayas for 15 years. But recent permitting changes had made it viable for Boustead and a small squad of porters to cross all of Nepal in one five-month push, connecting the country’s ranges in his attempted pilgrimage to that holy mountain. Boustead never made it to Kailash, but the journey across Nepal inspired what has since become his life’s work: the establishment of and advocacy for the Great Himalaya Trail and its potential to bring sustainability and income to some of the most remote corners of the world. “It could be a vehicle for promoting responsible, community-sensitive mountain tourism,” Boustead said last year of the trail. “It could bring income to villages that were thought by many in Kathmandu to have little, if anything, to offer tourism.”

At nearly 3,000 miles, the Great Himalaya Trail traverses the entire region; it is often called the highest alpine hiking route in the world, with passes that can cross the 20,000-feet threshold. But as it cuts from Pakistan to Bhutan, it is neither the most logistically nor physically amenable thru-hike. The permits can be a patchwork, and guides, especially in Bhutan, can be pricey. And, of course, these are among the most demanding mountains in the world: “Climbing in the Himalaya, crossing glaciers and high passes, and depending on the weather for a little bit of luck invites danger that no expertise, no team of accomplished guides, no high-tech gear, and no level of fitness can ever totally eliminate,” wrote Wiebke Nedel in her Backpacker chronicle of a 2018 journey across Nepal in which their head cook, Khem, was killed by a rockfall. Even on a trip with that much tragedy, Nedel found herself moved by the majesty of the landscape and the generosity of the people, the same factors that prompted Boustead to stitch together the Great Himalaya Trail a decade earlier.