Border wall construction closes Arizona Trail’s southern terminus through 2027

Border wall construction has cut off the Arizona Trail’s symbolic southern endpoint, closing the last mile inside Coronado National Memorial and blocking access to Border Monument 102, the traditional start-and-finish marker for generations of thru-hikers.

The Arizona Trail Association said the closure began Monday, April 13, 2026, and runs from Border Monument 102, the trail’s southern terminus, to the Joe’s Canyon Trail junction at mile 1.0. Hikers are being told not to use the Arizona National Scenic Trail or Yaqui Ridge Trail south of Joe’s Canyon until the closure is lifted. The group says the shutdown is likely to last through the end of 2027, turning a short stretch of trail into a long interruption for anyone planning an end-to-end Arizona Trail finish.

That matters because the AZT is not a local footpath; it is 800 miles long and one of only 11 federally designated National Scenic Trails. Border Monument 102 has served for more than 30 years as the place hikers start their southbound journeys or pose at the end of a northbound thru-hike, and contractors for the Department of Homeland Security first blocked access there with concertina wire in November 2025. The current plan includes two 30-foot-tall steel barriers with a 150-foot-wide road between them, and the nearest parking area is only about a half-mile away, so this is not a remote washout or a shrug-and-detour situation. It is an access break at one of the trail’s most photographed and most meaningful points.

The Arizona Trail Association is working with the National Park Service on a possible new southern terminus monument on Coronado Peak, just south of Montezuma Pass. That spot looks out over the San Rafael Valley and sits where Dale Shewalter first envisioned the Arizona Trail in the 1970s, giving the trail a legal and practical fallback if Border Monument 102 stays out of reach. For now, the closure is unlikely to derail most northbound hikers finishing this spring, since many are racing desert heat and trying to close out in April. Southbound hikers planning autumn starts will have to build a different story around a trail that, for the moment, no longer ends where it always has.