Not even a stress fracture could end Annika Ananias’ 2022 thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. She first felt the pain in her left foot soon after exiting the Sierra Nevada, more than a thousand miles from the United States’ southern border.
She trudged ahead for another week or so, then finally opted for X-rays in the idyllic California town of Quincy. Nothing. She took a few days off, hoping whatever tendon she’d strained or bone she’d bruised would quickly heal. She headed north again, only to have the pain intensify. This time, the doctor saw it—a broken foot, a prescription for a clunky boot, and an order to get off the PCT.
“I had to tell my trail family that I was not going to be able to continue for now…That was really hard, and not just for reasons of hiking,” said Ananias, back home in Munich. “I just got together with my American partner on trail and made another good friend. Are we able to see each other again? Is that it now? I struggled a lot mentally.”
So she and Ryan, the boyfriend she’d met 700 miles earlier at the southern edge of the Sierra Nevada, decided to hitchhike the 200 miles southwest to San Francisco. And then they headed south again to Big Sur, on a coastal California road trip. Two Quincy trail angels, Jim and Shane, eventually took Ananias in as her foot healed and Ryan headed back to the trail. Each week, she got another X-ray. When the doctors finally signed off on 10 miles a day, she raced back to trail, rejoining Ryan and rapidly ratcheting up her mileage. They went as far north through Washington as wildfires would permit, then backtracked to walk through Oregon in the fall as she waited on a visa extension. In short, they improvised.
“No mosquitoes, nice weather, no people, just beautiful,” said Ananias, or Ravenclaw on trail, with a grin. “Fires were all over the place, so a lot of people skipped Oregon. In the end, I think I hiked more than most people that year.”
But Ananias did not have the opportunity to improvise during her planned American thru-hike this year. On February 24, the day before her 38th birthday, Ananias landed at Miami International Airport with another road-trip dream alongside Ryan: They would see a SpaceX launch at the Kennedy Space Center on the 26th, then cut across the state to swim with manatees on the Crystal River. They would visit the Everglades and begin a weeklong journey across the southern edge of the United States to the southern terminus of the Arizona Trail. Finally, they would hike 800 miles north through the desert, up the Colorado Plateau, through the Grand Canyon, and to the Utah border. But their plan crumbled in the face of a Customs and Border Protection officer.
Ananias at the southern terminus on the CDT, finishing her SOBO thru-hike in 2024. | Ryan Twigg
An hour after her arrival in Miami, Ananias was pulled in for extra questioning. The officer asked how she paid for her extended American stays, refused to look at her bank statements, and questioned the validity of her PCT hike in 2022 and her Continental Divide Trail hike two years later. “They were threatening me: ‘Oh, we’re going to find out, so you better just tell us you worked here illegally,’” said Ananias, who works as a freelance graphic designer in Germany and receives support from her father. “But I had nothing to find, and I knew it was not going to help me to freak out or start crying.”
Officers searched her baggage, then her body against a wall. They mocked her for the amount of medication she carried. Before her phone was taken, officers allowed her to call Ryan, briefly, and explain her situation. Her shoelaces and most of her clothes were confiscated, and officers told her she was being deported, her visa canceled. She would be banned, they said, from the United States for five years. She spent most of the next 24 hours in a freezing holding cell, trying to comfort the younger Spanish woman locked away beside her. Ananias had been to 47 countries on seven continents, and this would have been her fifth time in the States. She’d never been treated like this anywhere. When officials returned her phone to her at the gate, as she headed for a plane bound for Munich without Ryan, she noticed the “Happy Birthday” messages on her phone.
“When I came home, I considered myself lucky,” said Ananias. She read the recent story of Becky Burke, a 28-year-old Welsh tourist detained in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Washington State for 19 days during a multinational backpacking trip. She read about Jessica Brösche, a fellow German held for 46 days, including nine in solitary confinement.
“I don’t know how they survived that, because 22 hours were already awful,” she continued. “I got lucky, because I didn’t get put in for weeks or even put in handcuffs, only yelled at. But that’s the thing, right? I am considering myself lucky for being treated like a criminal.”
Ananias is not alone, either. In the months since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, border officials turned away at least one other hiker attempting to hike the Arizona Trail. And, maybe more importantly, countless others have preemptively canceled their intended trips, either for fear of shifting American policies or out of personal reprisal against such policies. The numbers so far are mixed: More international hikers will be on the CDT this year than ever before; folks from three-dozen countries have been on the Appalachian Trail in 2025. Several dozen international hikers bound for the PCT, however, have scratched their sojourns.
With the military deployed in major American cities to carry out immigration arrests and the Trump administration boasting of plans for an “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida for detainees, the fate of thru-hikers feels, of course, minor. But new border regulations and enforcement measures have created a chilling effect for people’s willingness to travel to some of the world’s most iconic routes and the country more broadly. Ananias, for instance, doesn’t intend to contest her five-year ban; she instead plans to find alternatives to the United States.
“I do want to come back. My partner’s family lives there, and I love the thru-hiking culture, the community,” said Ananias a day after returning from France’s Tour du Mont Blanc. “But right now, I don’t want to travel there. There’s so much going on that’s disturbing to everyone, not just Americans.”
Annika Ananias en route to Lima, Montana while hiking the CDT in 2024. | Ryan Twigg
AS PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION results began to roll in during the evening of November 5, 2024, Matthew Nelson began to expect trouble.
After years of volunteer trail construction in southern Arizona and taking inner-city kids outside via the Sierra Club, Nelson became the executive director of the Arizona Trail Association in 2012. In that span, he had become overly familiar with the nuances and complexities of running a walking trail to and from the United States’ southern border. Agents would often patrol on and near the trail, and he knew that anyone who looked even vaguely brown along the corridor faced the risk of questioning and detainment. He remembers one thru-hiker—a military veteran who has also done volunteer work on the Arizona Trail—being stopped at Montezuma Pass, a mile from the border and the trail’s southern terminus. Agents asked for ID and hectored him with questions.
“He had spent almost six weeks hiking from Utah to Mexico, and he spent the last mile really pissed off,” said Nelson. “He had been stopped just because he was brown. The agents were not very nice.”
During the waning months of the first Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security shuttered that first (or final) mile of trail in order to build 400 feet of “tall wall” in Coronado National Memorial, a park originally intended to consecrate “the harmonious relationships between Mexico and the United States.” Nelson tried to make the case for leaving the trail open during construction, but public safety concerns overruled his argument, since contractors would need to blast their way through the Huachuca Mountains to build roads to build the wall. The section only reopened on January 1, 2022, and that span of wall still stands alone, bound by barbed wire on both sides.
“When Trump got [re]elected, I think, ‘OK, the trail’s going to get shut down again, and they’re going to build more wall unnecessarily,’” said Nelson, sighing. Indeed, less than three months after Trump’s inauguration, word arrived from Customs and Border Protection that they intended to build 25 more miles of wall, beginning at the AZT’s southern terminus, and to anticipate more closures.
“When the border becomes militarized and there’s more agents on the ground and more construction and blasting and the trail is shut down, that changes the scenic nature of a Congressionally designated National Scenic Trail,” Nelson said. “It also really affects the human experience—how people are interacting with each other, the landscape.”
Nelson, though, did not anticipate that people might not get to the trail at all. Sure, he expected another travel ban, which arrived in June and imposed new visa embargoes or restrictions on places as far-flung as Togo and Turkmenistan, Laos and Libya. And he expected draconian policies on the southern border. But when he first read an account of Ananias’ ordeal in Miami on the hiking blog The Trek, he recognized a new type of trouble.
“If somebody was traveling from Mexico or South America or any demographic the Trump administration was targeting, there was an increased risk of harassment,” said Nelson. “But a white European woman is not the demographic I would have expected to be harassed, detained, deported and not allowed back in the country for five years. It’s not racial profiling. It’s sending a message that you are not welcome here. Even if you’re bringing your money, you are not welcome.”
Unprecedented emails began to trickle into Arizona Trail Association inboxes, too. At least five hikers were scrapping their intended hikes in Arizona, either for fear of American policies and mercurial border agents or because American values no longer aligned with their own. They didn’t need to cancel permits or request any sort of refund; they simply felt the need to tell trail officials why they were opting out.
"That is something I have never heard of in my career—people canceling their trips to Arizona for political reasons,” Nelson said. “When I look at what the U.S. has to offer in terms of long-distance trails, it’s probably the best in the world. But there’s a whole bunch of other countries that are safer to travel to right now, so I don’t blame those people at all.”
International hikers come from all over the world to experience long trails like the AZT. Here, Mexico’s rugged, mountainous terrain can be seen from the trail, just out of reach. | Jono Melamed
BY THE TIME Nathaniel and Carrie were finishing their final preparations for their own northbound trek of the Arizona Trail, news of Ananias’ detention was six weeks old.
The international couple (both of whom asked not to use their real names for fear of government scrutiny) met three years earlier when Nathaniel, an American citizen, became a hiking-world celebrity after a yearlong feat of endurance. Carrie, from Alberta, messaged him on Instagram, and the rest is semi-long-distance relationship history. When Carrie visited Nathaniel, she had always taken care to avoid breaking the law, never spending more than six months of any one-year span in the States. Two seasonal workers in their 30s, they had crossed the border together maybe 10 times and several more separately before they were set to begin the Arizona Trail. They weren’t too concerned about potential problems, despite increased border scrutiny under the new administration.
“When we come in together, it’s never been more than a three-minute conversation with a customs agent, usually less,” said Nathaniel. “It’s never been more complex than that.” This is the first interview either Carrie or Nathaniel has given about the ordeal; Carrie sat it out, still too bothered by the experience.
Their plan this time, though, was admittedly complex. Nathaniel’s family was going on a Costa Rican vacation soon after the couple finished their five-week trek. He had flown to Canada not only to visit Carrie, but to haul all of her hiking gear and the clothes she’d need for a tropical vacation back to the States. Carrie would fly to Phoenix with nothing more than a camera and a purse, not even a carry-on. Nathaniel would join her there with both their backpacks in tow, to see the Golden State Warriors, anchored by his beloved Steph Curry, play the Phoenix Suns. The tickets were his birthday gift from his parents, the most expensive he’d ever been given. A hiking friend Nathaniel had met in Maine would then drive the pair to the terminus.
Again, a Customs and Border Protection agent took exception. “She was trying to explain backpacking to him, and he said that makes no sense. ‘Why don’t you have anything with you?’” said Nathaniel. “She explained that, and he said, ‘Oh, you have a boyfriend in the States? Are you living together down there? You know what this looks like, right?’”
For the agent, at least as Carrie came to understand it, she appeared to be bailing on Canada before Trump tried to make good on his threats to make it the 51st state. She began trotting out documents to prove her ties to her country: a mortgage statement, a bank account showing her balance. When he asked if she owned a car in Canada, she offered to show him recent registration slips to prove that she actually owned two. He didn’t want to see those. “At one point, he cut her off and said, ‘You’re not getting it. You don’t see what’s going on here,’” said Nathaniel. “He just gaslit her the whole time.”
Carrie had arrived at the airport hours early, anticipating delays. But as she waited to be cleared, she realized she would miss her flight. When she tried to call a Canadian airline to explain her situation, another immigration agent snapped, telling her no phones were allowed. She’d been texting Nathaniel back in the States, his own flight delayed. As it became clear she wasn’t getting on a plane, he was able to retrieve their backpacks, get a flight refund, and offload his NBA tickets at a loss.
When Carrie told the agent interrogating her that she would be rebooking her return flight from Costa Rica directly to Canada, he mocked her. “The guy said, ‘What’s wrong? You don’t want to go through this again?’” Nathaniel explained. “And then he said, ‘Yeah, we do have a new administration around here.’ He laughed and pointed up at a picture of Trump in his office.” (Trails reached out to the Department of Homeland Security with questions pertaining to both Carrie’s and Ananias’ border incidents and did not receive a response.)
She wasn’t getting in, at least not that day. The agent wouldn’t tell Carrie when she could try to reenter the United States (she didn’t receive the same five-year ban as Ananias), only that she was being denied entry for “a perceived intent to immigrate to the United States.” He provided a list of documents approved for entry, all of which she already had. He told her she could use her phone only when she was out of the airport, but that that might be a while, since she would need to be escorted through Canadian security, and they’d certainly have lots of questions.
“These two big men walk her all the way back through the airport to Canadian customs, and the [Canadian] officers just wave security away, pretty annoyed,” Nathaniel said. “They didn’t even look at her passport, ask her a single question. They just said, ‘You’re one of several today already. Just go on through.’”
Nathaniel flew to Canada three days later. He and Carrie talked of crossing again, of simply starting their hike later. But what if she was turned away once more, even detained? What if she was, like Ananias, barred from the country for five years? The risk wasn’t worth even the reward of a backpacking trip.
In mid-May, they traveled in Canada to hike the Bruce Trail, which crosses Ontario from the Bruce Peninsula (which juts into Lake Huron) to Niagara Falls. Carrie then flew from Costa Rica to Canada and back, without incident.
International thru-hikers, some of whom once supported nonprofits like the Arizona Trail Association, have decided not to return to trails in the U.S., often for fear of detainment at the border. | Mike Cavaroc
FOR THE PAST half-decade, Doug Clark, a retired 73-year-old civil engineer from British Columbia, has left Canada every winter with his wife, Linda. They have decamped to Arizona, renting an apartment or house near the corridor of the Arizona Trail for a few weeks at a time. In his piecemeal way, he’s cobbled together a third of the trail’s length. He has done the Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim in the Grand Canyon, and he loves the rugged landscape around Tucson.
He was hoping to head north of Phoenix this year, to hike the section of the trail that stair-steps up the Colorado Plateau. But then Trump began levying tariffs against Canada and talking of annexation, of making his country the 51st state.
“That was the last straw, the straw that broke the back of me wanting to come to the States,” Clark said. He wrote to Nelson at the Arizona Trail Association to say he wasn’t making his annual trip. He let his membership lapse, even as trail associations nationwide worry that federal funding cuts would hamstring their initiatives. “It’s a little bit of punishment and a lot of disappointment in what America is doing.”
It is not a one-time move, either. Clark insists he will not return while Trump remains president, because his policies and their potential outcomes are too volatile for safety. “Trump is not trustworthy. He could say one thing today and turn on a dime the next. I’m not going to do anything to support the States while he is in office,” he said. “History has shown that empires come and go. Trump is an accelerant.”
Such absences, Nelson said, are detrimental to trail culture, a loss to the unspoken exchange that happens in the small towns that dot the path. He worries less about his organization and the landscape it protects than the impact on people themselves.
“The diversity coming through these towns changes who we are and what we do,” he said. “The trail community will feel the effects of political decisions and then the decisions of individuals who choose not to come here. I believe it’s temporary, but it’s really unfortunate.”
When Nelson talks about Carrie or Ananias, he talks about a future, perhaps a few years from now, when he can reach out to offer not just an apology but, just maybe, offer a hike sponsored by the state or another organization. He knows they lost money on plane tickets and basketball tickets and shuttle launch tickets, and he wants them to finally see Arizona, without fear of never making it to the actual trail.
The entire ordeal expedited Ananias’ life plan, at least. She and Ryan got married in early July, making it easier for them to live together in Germany. They’ve got a long list of European hikes to do, including a honeymoon jaunt in the Pyrenees. And then, maybe in four years, they’ll head back to the States to try again.
“I’m just going to wait it out, until I see it all settle down,” she said. “I’ll hike the Arizona Trail and see the manatees and hopefully see a rocket launch. I’ll see whatever I want to see.”
