Over the course of nearly five years, a female gazelle in Mongolia completed a remarkable journey of at least 18,000 kilometers (11,185 miles). It crossed frozen rivers, encountered oil fields, negotiated fenced boundaries with China and Russia and trekked 900 kilometers just to survive two months of one particularly brutal winter, according to a new study.

Extremely long journeys might not be unusual for Mongolian gazelles (Procapra gutturosa), but technology that enables finely detailed tracking of migrating mammals has only became available in the past two decades.

The cumulative distance traveled by this gazelle during the study period corresponded to almost half of the circumference of Earth’s equator. It would take more than a year for a human walking 12 hours daily on a flat land to complete a journey of that distance, according to one walk-time calculator. Other hoofed mammals, or ungulates, that have made recently documented journeys include a white-eared kob (also a type of antelope) that completed an 860-kilometer ring-shaped route spanning South Sudan and Ethiopia in 13 months, according to a 2018 master’s thesis by Kasahun Abera Legesse of Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia.

More than half of the world’s gazelles of the species live on Mongolia’s Eastern Steppe.