Search “Pacific Crest Trail northern terminus” this week and you won’t find much about actually reaching it. Since late July 2026, the Pacific Crest Trail Association has closed the trail’s final stretch up to Monument 78 — the stone obelisk on the US-Canada border that’s supposed to be the last five minutes of a five-month walk. The Ptarmigan Fire put that finish line inside an active burn zone. It’s still standing. Nobody’s touching it.

For most northbound thru-hikers, that’s not a footnote. It’s the whole point of the last 2,650 miles. So instead of turning around, some of them built their own ending — plywood, permanent marker, borrowed flags — and others hiked out to a different, older monument entirely, one most PCT hikers had never heard of before this summer. Here’s what actually closed, why, and what “finishing” the PCT has come to mean for the class of 2026.

Quick Verdict: PCT Northern Terminus, Sept. 9, 2026

Question	Answer
Is Monument 78 open?	No. Closed since late July 2026
What’s closed?	The final stretch from Harts Pass to the Canadian border, roughly 30 miles
Why?	The lightning-caused Ptarmigan Fire, burning in the Pasayten Wilderness since July 17
How big is the fire?	Over 25,000 acres, roughly three-quarters contained as of Sept. 5
Any other PCT closures right now?	Yes — a separate 50-mile section between Snoqualmie Pass and Highway 2, closed by the Three Queens Fire
What are hikers doing instead?	Ending at homemade trailside monuments or hiking out to Monument 47, an existing border marker reachable by an alternate route
Reopening date?	Not announced

What’s Actually Burning

The Ptarmigan Fire started with lightning on the night of July 15-16, in a remote corner of the Pasayten Wilderness about 20 miles northwest of Mazama, Washington. Nobody saw it happen. A hiker at the Goat Peak Lookout spotted the smoke on July 17, and by the time crews got eyes on it, it was already burning in terrain too steep and too remote for much more than aerial monitoring. Smokejumpers were on it the next day. An Okanogan-Wenatchee Type 3 team took over full management on July 25, after the fire made a serious run.

That run put it directly east of the PCT’s final approach to the border. By late July, the trail was closed from Harts Pass north to Monument 78 — the last roughly 30 miles of a northbound thru-hike, the stretch most hikers treat as a victory lap. As of September 5, the fire had burned past 25,000 acres and was roughly three-quarters contained, according to InciWeb’s incident tracking. Contained doesn’t mean gone, and it doesn’t mean reopened. The closure has held for six weeks and counting.

Ptarmigan wasn’t operating alone, either. In the fire’s early days, the closure line briefly ran all the way down to Rainy Pass — a longer stretch, roughly 43 miles to the border — before crews got enough of a handle on the fire to pull that boundary back to Harts Pass. That earlier, longer closure is the reason the first homemade monument ended up where it did.

Is the PCT’s Northern Terminus Open in 2026?

1. No. Monument 78, the official US-Canada border terminus, has been off-limits to hikers since late July 2026.
2. The closed section runs from Harts Pass to the border — the final leg of a northbound thru-hike, and historically the easiest.
3. The Ptarmigan Fire is the cause, burning east of the trail in the Pasayten Wilderness since mid-July.
4. There’s no announced reopening date. PCTA’s closures page is the source to check before planning a border push, not this article.
5. A second, unrelated closure — 50 miles between Snoqualmie Pass and Highway 2, caused by the Three Queens Fire — is also active and running through at least October 31.

Monument 47: The Border Marker Nobody Used to Visit

Monument 47 is a five-foot stainless-steel obelisk that has marked the US-Canada boundary along the 49th parallel for over a century, sitting in a remote pocket of Whatcom County’s Mount Baker Wilderness roughly 47 miles east of Point Roberts. It was never part of the PCT. Almost nobody hiked to it on purpose — until this summer, when it became the only border monument northbound hikers could actually reach.

Credit for that goes mostly to Lucile Sarrazin, a 36-year-old schoolteacher from Montpellier, France, hiking under the trail name “Early Bird.” When the Ptarmigan closure cut her off from Monument 78, she went looking for another way to physically touch the border rather than stop short of it — she pieced together an alternate route from Concrete, Washington, up to Monument 47 and reached it on July 31. “I am not stopping short of the border,” she told reporters. Word spread through the hiker community fast, the way trail intel always does — apps, register entries, other hikers at the last resupply town — and by late August, a steady trickle of northbound finishers was making the same detour. Elly Bier reached the obelisk August 30. David Whitehair got there September 2, calling his group “the class of resilience.” None of it is official. Monument 47 isn’t the PCT’s terminus and the route to it isn’t a maintained trail. It became the finish line anyway, because it was a real international boundary marker and Monument 78 wasn’t reachable.

The Monument Hikers Built With Scrap Lumber

Not everyone routed to Monument 47. On July 29 — the day the closure boundary still sat at Rainy Pass — Portland emergency room nurse Ian Irwin and five fellow northbound hikers decided the trail simply ended where the trail ended. A friend hiked in with power tools and scrap lumber. What came out of it was a hand-lettered wooden sign reading “Northern Terminus Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail — Established by 2026 NOBOs on 7/29. Rainy Pass to Mexico 2650 Miles,” planted next to the trail with US and Canadian flags and a paper trail register for anyone who followed.

People followed. Within two weeks the register had signatures from hikers on three continents, according to KUOW’s reporting. “It was definitely disappointing,” Irwin said of the closure, “but it felt okay that it was something that was outside of our control.” Fellow hiker Derek Hu, who reached the makeshift monument in mid-August, put it more simply: “Reaching the end or not is actually not a big deal. I’m very grateful I have seen all the good friends, all the good memories, and all the good views.” That’s not resignation. It’s the same math anyone doing a long trail eventually does — the finish-line photo was never actually the reason for the 2,650 miles before it.

This Isn’t the Only Closure

If you’ve been reading this site’s other 2026 park coverage — Grand Canyon’s flash flood, the wildfire that shut a main road into Yosemite, Glacier’s preemptive flood closure — the PCT’s situation fits a pattern that’s been running all season: Western fire and flood disruptions landing on exactly the weeks people planned around. But the PCT’s version is worse in one specific way. A park closure ruins a week of somebody’s vacation. A terminus closure lands on the single day, after five to six months of walking, that a thru-hike was supposed to end.

And Ptarmigan isn’t the only fire drawing lines across the trail this year. A separate closure — 50 miles between Snoqualmie Pass and Highway 2 — has been in effect since August 11 because of the Three Queens Fire near Kachess Lake, with PCTA mapping a walking detour around it rather than leaving hikers stuck. Sam Webster, PCTA’s North Cascades regional manager, told Cascadia Daily News that a third of the Cascade region has been closed because of fires this year. He’s seen it before, but not at this scale: “The thru-hiker community is so tenacious,” he said. “By the time they get all the way up here, they are so determined to get to the border.”

What This Means If You’re Planning a Northbound Hike

A few things worth sorting before you build a season around finishing at the border:

• Don’t assume Monument 78 will be open by the time you’d reach it, even if you’re planning a 2027 start. Fire season in the North Cascades has closed some portion of this trail in four of the last six years, and there’s no guarantee this closure resolves before snow does the job instead.
• Check PCTA’s closures page directly, not a summary article, in the weeks before your border push. Boundaries move as containment changes, the way Ptarmigan’s already has.
• Have a mental plan for an anticlimactic ending. Every hiker quoted in this piece said some version of the same thing: the walk mattered more than the monument. That’s worth internalizing before you’re the one standing at a closure sign with four months of trail behind you.
• If a guaranteed finish line matters to you, weigh routes that don’t depend on wildfire-prone terrain for the last mile. A trail like the Camino Francés ends in a cathedral square, not a fire perimeter — a genuinely different kind of trip, but worth knowing the difference exists if this year has you rethinking things.
• If 2,650 miles isn’t the goal and a new, shorter walking route is, this was also the year two new long-distance trails opened without any of this baggage attached yet.

The Bottom Line

The Ptarmigan Fire has kept the PCT’s official Monument 78 terminus closed since late July 2026, cutting northbound thru-hikers off from the trail’s final stretch with no reopening date in sight. Some hikers responded by building their own monument out of scrap lumber at the trailhead where their hike actually ended. Others found their way to Monument 47, a century-old border obelisk that had nothing to do with the PCT until this summer turned it into the closest thing to a real finish line available. Neither is official. Both capture something the closure notices don’t: that a wildfire can take the last 30 miles of a trail without taking what the previous 2,620 were actually for.

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Fire and closure details per Pacific Crest Trail Association closures tracker and InciWeb. Monument 47 and hiker reporting per Cascadia Daily News. Homemade monument details per KUOW and OPB. Three Queens Fire closure details per the US Forest Service. Information current as of Sept. 9, 2026 — this is an active, developing situation; confirm status directly with PCTA before you go.