Backpacker (Nov 15, 2025) by Adam Roy

For more than 30 years, Arizona Trail hikers have celebrated their achievements at Monument 102, a stone obelisk that marks the U.S.-Mexico border and the southern end of the path. Whether kicking off an 800-mile adventure or celebrating the end of the journey of a lifetime, they could slip through the two-strand barbed wire fence and pose for a photo. But no more: In early November, the Arizona Trail Association (ATA) announced that contractors working for the Department of Homeland Security had blocked off the monument, some version of which has stood at the site since 1854, with an impassible roll of concertina wire, apparently in anticipation of border wall construction there. According to the ATA, which hopes to start construction on an alternate southern terminus in 2027, the disruption is likely permanent. We sat down to explain the latest disruption to a U.S. long trail.

If you’re headed to the southern terminus of the Arizona Trail, you’ll find a different scene there than you would have found even a few months ago.

Where there used to be a simple barbed wire fence that hikers would slip through to take their pictures with the southern terminus monument, there’s now an impassable row of concertina wire, placed there by the Department of Homeland Security.

And according to the Arizona Trail Association, the loss of access is probably permanent.

The Arizona Trail Association says it didn’t get any advanced notice before contractors installed the new fencing, but that it went up sometime between October 21st and November 3rd.

In an email, the ATA’s executive director, Matthew Nelson, described the loss of access to the southern terminus monument as “nothing less than a desecration,” and told Backpacker that it was likely permanent.

The ATA has known for some time that the government intended to cut off hiker access to Monument 102, which marks the southern end of the AZT. When the Trump administration began to build steel wall in the area in 2020, the ATA learned that it would run 10 feet to the north of the monument. While the organization attempted to negotiate to move the wall’s path around it so hikers could still access it, the request was denied.

Nelson says the ATA is currently working on a plan to build a new official ends to the trail, which would be north of the new access road and the under-construction border wall, but that it won’t be able to start construction of that new terminus until 2027.

This is the second time this fall that the government’s current push to lock down the US’s southern border has restricted or banned access to the southern terminus of a major long trail.

In late September, the Continental Divide Trail Coalition announced that the federal government would now require hikers to obtain a permit from the military in order to access the last 1.1 miles of the trail to its southern terminus, and that hikers who were not US citizens would need a government sponsor and an escort to make the pilgrimage at all.

Unlike the restrictions at the southern terminus of the CDT, the ATA says that there’s no process for hikers to bypass the new fencing to take their picture with the monument, and asks that for safety reasons, hikers don’t attempt to do so themselves.

To read the article online, click here.