First I’ll point out that I am just asking out of curiosity. I’m not establishing a plan to hop the border.
Poking around with Google Earth, I see that there is a park right on the Can/US border, right beside the Peace Arch crossing. The area of the park is in the US but the Northern edge of the park is literally on top of the border.
There is no fence and, in fact, there is easy pedestrian access to the park from the Canadian side and a sign right on the border facing the Canadian side stating “Dogs On Leash”. It seems use of the park by Canadians is expected.
But the park also has a parking lot that is connected to the streets on the US side.
What is stopping someone from entering the park from the Canadian side, throwing the ball around for a while and having a picnic, and then getting into a car in the parking lot and continuing on into the US?
Now, I’m not under the impression there isn’t anyone keeping an eye on the park, but what happens on a bright sunny day when lots of people from both sides are continually entering the park, doing their thing and then leaving? Extra border people walking around checking ID’s all day?
Apparently, the whole idea of the park is that you can cross to the parts on the other side of the border. From the website:
So you can cross within the park, but your supposed to exit on “your” side. As a practical matter, I don’t think the gov’t really tries that hard to keep people from crossing the border on foot (there are places where its a lot easier to do so then a park right next to a border crossing, look further West and there are plenty of places where neighbourhoods abut the border and one could just stroll across. The only “barrier” is a small ditch), so they probably just watch to make sure people don’t start hauling boxes or backpacks from one side to the other.
There’s something similar in Waterton/Glacier Park. You can take a boat ride from the Canadian side to a dock and ranger station a few miles into the US. You can hang out and stroll around the ranger station without going through US customs, but you have to check in with the customs officer in the ranger station if you hike any further.
At the Peace Arch you have to leave your car in a parking lot outside of the “neutral zone” on either side of the border, so I don’t imagine they have too many problems with people abandoning their cars and walking across on foot, but they probably have cameras to kind of keep their eyes on people.
Note the Peace Garden works different in that it’s much to big to explore on foot, so you drive your car into the “neutral zone” and park there, then drive out through customs when you’re done.
Portages on both sides of the border can be used by people from either nation from Lake Superior to Lake of the Woods. Webster-Ashburton Treaty. Most of the way is in parks, with Quetico and Boundary Waters being the largest.
Yes, if you look further east along Zero Avenue, you have a street with ordinary houses on the north side and a small ditch on the south side, with park beyond. The ditch is the actual border.
I’ve been to Waterton many times, and that’s my understanding–you can get on the boat cruise (which is geared towards day-use tourists and begins and ends in Alberta, Canada) without documentation; but when the boat reaches the dock in Montana, USA, you’re limited to the dock area and the ranger station. Those hikers who wish to explore Montana further on the Glacier Park trails must check in with US Customs and present proper documents.
There is, however, little worry about illegal aliens crossing into either country in Waterton/Glacier International Peace Park. While they are “joined” as an international park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the terrain is quite rugged, there are few to no connections between the two–pretty much just the boat cruise and hiking trails–so unless one is prepared for a long, tough hike over unbroken territory, one is unlikely to succeed in getting to civilization in the country of their choice. Oh, and there are grizzly bears in the border area. Many, many grizzly bears.
To give you an idea of what one would be up against, here is a photo of Cameron Lake in the Waterton/Glacier park. The foreground is in Canada; the mountain in the background is in the USA. A hiking trail runs along the right-hand side of the lake, to just beyond the point you can see. Then it stops, and there is a warning sign that the US border is a couple of hundred yards ahead, but the area is populated by grizzly bears. Travelling beyond that point is not recommended, owing to the bears; and there are no trails. It would be a very tough slog to get through the bears and over the mountain to a town in Montana, assuming one survived it.
Is this park on the Washington state / British Columbia border, by any chance? I remember going by a peace arch, and a piece arch park several times as a kid when we’d go through the border on our way up to Tsawassen.
The one I remember was in plain view from the official border crossing and customs station, so I imagine it would have been rather tricky smuggling through there.