Half-built walls and ruined mountains: Pictures and video show the remains of Trump's incomplete border wall

• Construction has paused on Trump's border wall following a proclamation by President Joe Biden.
• Insider commissioned a photographer to document parts of the border wall that never got done.
• The landscape is strewn with rough roads, rubble, and evidently useless portions of wall.

All along the US-Mexico border, the machines are silent. On January 20, President Joe Biden gave workers seven days to wind down construction on President Donald Trump's signature project, the border wall.

That work has paused while the Biden administration reviews all contracts and the costs of "terminating or repurposing" them.

A total of 453 miles of new primary or secondary barrier were completed under Trump.

Much of this is a continuous barrier along flat land, without the gaps and problems documented here. Nonetheless, the project has left some areas, especially around southeastern Arizona, in disarray.

Toward the end of Trump's term, contractors rushed to tackle arduous terrain, carving access roads and blasting staging areas into areas that campaigners said would never actually be completed.

Insider commissioned the photographer John Darwin Kurc to document those parts of the border where work has suddenly stopped.

Kurc, who has made it no secret that he opposes the border wall, has spent months documenting the project and its impact on the environment.

Blasting continued on Inauguration Day, hours before Biden signed the proclamation halting the project.

Massive staging areas and rough access roads - built to service the vehicles and construction workers in what had been pristine wilderness - are empty or are parking lots for machinery.

Here's an abandoned staging area east of Douglas, Arizona, on February 5:

In Arizona's mountainous regions, the stalled project has left segments of wall perched on steep outcrops in areas that campaigners say were too inhospitable for people to attempt to cross anyway.

Laiken Jordahl, a borderlands campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity, described a similar scene in the Coronado National Memorial, an otherwise protected landscape. He called it "completely surreal."

"We've got a mile section of wall standing as an island in the middle of these rugged mountains, with nothing on either side of it," he told Insider.

"It's got half-dynamited hillsides that will just start eroding away as soon as it rains, destroying more habitat and wilderness land.

"It's infuriating - they've destroyed so much in order to put up this tiny section of wall in the middle of a beautiful national park and national forestland."

Drone footage taken on January 30 shows the extensive damage to remote landscapes such as Cuenca Los Ojos:

The campaigners also said that in some mountainous locations, the construction had made border security worse, the opposite of Trump's aim.

They argued that switchback access roads - such as the one pictured below in Coronado National Forest - made the land much more passable to foot traffic.

Another example is this new set of routes leading to the border-wall site east of the Sasabe point of entry. The wall stops short, and just beyond it is a road to the rest of the US.

Progress on the wall stopped short of an artificial canyon blasted through a peak known informally as "Shadow Mountain," Kurc said. (It's separate from the popular hiking spot with that name near Phoenix.)

"In Guadalupe Canyon, the giant scar that they've gouged through this mountain in order to build the wall, it just defies all logic," Jordahl said.

"You're going to have a wall in a trench with a hundred-foot cliff to the south of it and a place where clearly no human being could ever cross."

Just below this peak, a gap remains in a spot designed for a doorway:

At Cuenca Los Ojos, an obelisk demarcating the Mexico-US border stands at an unfinished doorway in the wall.

Conservationists are cautiously relieved at the silence.

"We've seen these staging areas where it used to be just hundreds of people buzzing about just totally empty for the first time in years," Jordahl told Insider.

"It's actually quiet out on the border. It's pretty surreal, just because at all of these places there used to just be incessant construction activity. And now it's just deserted."