Hikers fight plan for border wall
— Tess Mullaney remembers looking at endless rolling desert hills, covered in a thin layer of white snow just as the sun was rising the day she embarked on a 2½-month journey through the Arizona Trail, an 800mile system that starts at the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona and ends at the Utah one.
In a picture from that February 2019, Mullaney, 28, is smiling as she poses behind a thin barbed-wire fence that divides Arizona from Mexico. She’s standing next to Border Monument 102, an engraved pillar marking the boundary of the United States. Engraved in the monument is this warning:
“The destruction or displacement of this monument is a misdemeanor punishable by the United States or Mexico”
Now, the government is proposing to do just that. It plans on building a 30-foot border wall there, threatening the view so many hikers marvel at— and the ecological life around it.
Mullaney and others are calling on the government to abandon plans to build 2 miles of new fencing they say will destroy the monument that marks the beginning of the Arizona Trail, which is also within the Coronado National Memorial. That southern terminus marks where some believe Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado first crossed into Arizona from Sonora in the mid 1500s in his quest to find gold.
The government also plans to build a ground detection system, a road and new lighting. It’s part of President
Donald Trump’s plan to build hundreds of miles of border wall, a campaign promise he has so far maintained.
“To remove not only this symbolism, but also the beauty, seclusion, protection, and wildlife migratory abilities in this area would be saddening to all who enjoy it,” Mullaney said.
Known as “thru-hikers,” an estimated 700 people traverse the entirety of the Arizona Trail in one trip, and thousands more hike different parts of the trail, each year. Thru-hikers have to first be dropped off at a trailhead two miles from the border. They then hike down to the monument that marks where the trail starts, a crucial marker for adventurers, said Matthew J. Nelson, executive director of the Arizona Trail Association.
For years, that part of the border has been protected by a small barbed-wire fence, and Nelson said he doesn’t know of any issues with illegal border crossers there. The area is mountainous and rugged, difficult to access from the south.
Nelson said his opposition to the border wall project at that location isn’t political, but about preserving the crucial point of a massive trail that took volunteers years to complete. He says the trail attracts thousands of visitors who stimulate the local economies of nearby communities, like the city of Sierra Vista.
“It’s a point of pride, and so I hope that people recognize that impact to a quarter-mile of the trail is an impact to the entire 800mile organism,” Nelson said.
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