Wee Steps to Mountain Goathood

MY CLIMB GEAR, REBUILT

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 04:02:41 GMT

After nearly a year of gear cutting, snipping an retooling, with a few missteps along the way, I think I have settled on my go-to equipment for multi-day sorties to the great Philippine outdoors. The basic building block is my shelter and sleeping gear configuration. Most of the other items are tailored to fit in with this system.

Having convinced myself that conventional tents are too heavy and some parts like floors and double walls redundant, I now use almost exclusively a floor-less, poles-free shaped tarp called a Mountain Laurel Designs Trailstar (the brown one, below). The material is silicone-impregnated ripstop nylon that weighs about 482 grammes, less than half a kilo. With guylines, trekking pole support and conventional stakes the weight rises to 985g, or half that of the previous solo dome tent I had used. The weight could be trimmed down to 800g by replacing the pole and stakes with expensive materials, but I'm happy with what I have. The shelter is more storm-worthy than most tents, the only downsides being condensation beneath the tent wall and potential flooding during heavy rain. I just need to be more selective on where I pitch it. Grassy mounds is the rule of the thumb.

After concluding that I did not need bed-like sleeping pads, I banished my Therm-a-Rest and made do with a stripped-down car windshield visor atop a trimmed-down tarpaulin sheet. Together with an unlined sleeping bag the weight adds up to 670g. There is room for improvement here -- I am thinking of replacing the bag with a water-resistant ultra-light bivy and ditching the tarp for sorties into all but the tallest mountains where I would have to sleep way above 2,000 metres. That should cut half a kilo.

Going without a sleep pad means I do not have material to shape an ultra-light backpack without internal stays, so I settled on the Hyperlight Mountain Gear Porter pack with a single bin liner. The cuben-fibre fabric is white and while water-proof, it could be prone to punctures from thorns, and so I use an old pack cover. When at camp I also use the latter to wrap the handle of the trek pole, to prevent a puncture on the tent fabric. These add up to a measly 965g -- a conventional day pack weighs at least 1.3 kilos.

All together my so-called big three items of tent, pack and sleeping gear are at 2.62kg. That's equivalent to the weight of one conventional two-person tent. My colleagues would be carrying the equivalent of 4.5-5 kilos for these items.

I still use my MSR Whisperlite white-gas stove for efficient group meal cooking, a full-size Petzl Tikka 2 headlamp, and a plastic lunchbox with a cover for those packed lunches eaten along the trail. I have, however, acquired a wood stove burner called a Bushbuddy that should trim the stove weight by nearly a kilo for solo hikes. I now use a 2-litre Platypus container to store most of my trail water. I have switched my old Gerber paraframe knife to a Buck keychain-knife. While I have gotten into the habit of making do without a mid-layer fleece jacket, and using running shorts and singlets at camp I still tend to bring too much first aid and toiletries. My base pack weight currently stands at 5.18 kilos or 11.42 pounds.

The rest are food, fuel and water, which add up to just between 3-5 kilos depending on the length of the trek and water availability on the trail and at camp sites, giving me a maximum full pack weight of about 10 kilos. While it's not strictly ultra-light it's a remarkable weight saving -- some of my colleagues routinely haul 16-18 kilos for an equivalent climb.

THE MISSIONER OF MALINDANG

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 04:19:28 GMT

There is an Irishman living on the lower foothills of the Malindang mountains who, in the first few weeks of his lonely mission has learnt more about the range and its rich mosaic of inhabitants than what many Filipinos will ever know in their entire lifetimes. You will see eagles and flying lemurs, Father Brendan told me during a lunchtime pit stop at his ramshackle hilltop chapel -- where a black dog and a pregnant cat are among a few dozen parishioners -- on our way to climbing one of the least-known mountain destinations on Mindanao island. You will see trees and moss with medicinal properties, and you will meet the Subanen, a people who helped Spain build the island's coastal fortifications (against the slave-raiding Tausug), but who have been progressively pushed back inland until they were against the rocky crags of the mountain's towering canyons.

It's a sad story, but one that is not exceptionally rare in the Philippine context. Their farms scar the upper portions of the surrounding wall of mountains that used to harbour some of the richest flora and fauna of the archipelago (There are dozens of bird subspecies that are endemic to the range, I learnt). They used to practice slash-and-burn farming in one patch then moved on. It was a sustainable form of farming, but now they have no place else to go, said this modern-day disciple of Saint Columban, apparently without much conviction. And now it's just burn and burn, I completed his story for him. I am just five years older, but the gap in terms of cynicism is huge.

I joined a three-day climb of the range's North Peak, a modest 2,085 metres above sea level on my Suunto. Its summit is about 300 metres or so lower than the main peak, which when we were there was hidden by the thick fog. Piktandazan, the Subanen call it, the wellhead of the region's rivers. I had insisted on bringing my full pack to the summit (I'm an ultra-lighter now, it's less than 10 kilogrammes, what could go wrong?) during the 3.5-hour assault and duly suffered, reaching the top about 10 minutes behind the bulk of the party. Getting your body and your pack under and over the mossy, fallen trunks drains the life out of a big climber like me. I was just thankful that it was mainly cool under the still impressive canopy. People actually donned shell jackets as our sweat dried. I made do with a disposable raincoat. Once we had lunch however I was fine and back to speed. The descent back to our base camp, the yard of an elementary school that has but one teacher in a village called Barangay Lake Duminagat, took just over two hours.

The main peak is closed to visitors, which has no established trails, we were told by our guides. As far as they knew, only two attempts had succeeded in reaching the main summit. I take this to be good news for Father Brendan as well as for myself, because it's depressing to see the desperate poverty all around you even as the treeline creeps higher and higher. According to Lester, the region has the infamous distinction of siring the Kuratong Baleleng, second only to the Abu Sayyaf as the most notorious kidnap-for-ransom gang to have emerged from the Philippines.

We tend to make noises against illegal logging, but maybe because it is politically correct as well as convenient to do so, we refuse to call out the ordinary people who are doing all the slashing and burning to eke out a living, acre by acre each planting season. The forest soil is thin, and is only good for a few plantings, as the priest himself knows by now, so they have to move even higher, across ever steeper slopes, just to get by. They are on a treadmill that keeps getting steeper. When they reach the summit, what then? The main Subanen village of Lake Duminagat, with about 50 households, is at about 1,400masl, but there are now farms on the subsidiary peaks above 1,700 metres. Is the government even paying attention? Malindang is supposed to be a protected nature park. When he and Father Brendan celebrated a thanksgiving mass three day later the Tuguegarao archbishop Sergio Utleg, the team leader of our 10-member party, ranted about the abaca farmer who cleared a patch of forest on the far shore of the lake to plant his hemp. But what to do?

The hamlets below the lake -- Gandawan, Barangay Lake, and Masawan get by with vegetable plots and yams. Pack horses are the main beasts of burden, and only motorcycles can penetrate the rutted roads higher up because their officials had stolen the funds for road-building. Locals amuse themselves with a relentless brand of karaoke. It took us a two-hour hike to reach Barangay Lake from Masawan, which is accessible via a hair-raising, helmet-free dirt-bike ride along mountain dirt roads. At our first camp site I was apparently the only one who got a good night's sleep because I'm immune to noise distractions as long as the inside of my shelter is dry -- or at least the top of my ground sheet. It got quite cold at 11 Celsius before dawn, and I was thankful there was no rain to flood the floor, as I had ditched my fleece and down mid-layers for the trip. Bugsy got a bit of a culture shock in such spare accommodations. The upside is that I carry less than a kilogramme for the floor-less shelter, instead of nearly three for a conventional tent. Archie and Aggie use a Tarptent Contrail, a sort of in-between shelter with a trek pole support that retains a bathtub floor, without the extra weight, while Lester and Attorney Nuesa now both use identical one-person Big Agnes Fly Creeks, conventional double-wall shelters that, due to new designs and fabrics, likewise weigh less than a kilogramme.

We moved our camp up to the lake shore, about 35 minutes uphill, soon after we got back from North Peak. The trail follows a narrow saddle that I imagined was the lake's spillway. Parts of it passed beside huge, moss-backed boulders. Walking uphill during a storm would be a terrifying prospect.

We had four guides for this trek and three local tag-alongs. The lead guide is Kramy, who is associated with Habagat, one of the oldest local outdoor brands in the Philippines, and the others, I was told, were accountants. It's a pretty well-knit group based in a region that boasts some of the most imposing local climb destinations. These guys are habitues of Kitanglad, Dulang-dulang, Lumot, Sumagaya, Kalatungan, and many lesser peaks in between, and appear partial to hammocks. It's good news because it means they use mostly wooded camp sites. The visiting climbers themselves are a mix from Manila-based AMCI, people from Laoag and Tuguegarao, Archbishop Utleg's territory. We agreed on most anything except red meat and durian, but getting around the dietary restrictions was an exercise in bonding itself.

The trailhead is on a mountain town named after one of the Chinese-Filipino entrepreneurs who settled in the region, but to get there you have to take a roundabout route taking you to the south of Misamis Occidental province and tiny mountain towns of the adjoining Zamboanga del Sur province, including Tambulig, Molave and Josefina.

From our lakeside camp it was a short three-hour walk back to Masawan, followed by a dirt bike ride back to Father Brendan's church to compare notes. It is fashionable among some of my friends these days to disrespect priests, but not me. They get to travel a lot and listen to the people, so they are walking encyclopaedias and a rich source of information, even with the restrictions imposed by the confessional box. I hope that he does not become discouraged, because there are a lot of poor souls that need to be saved there.

MAKILING AND THE NEAR MOUNTAINS

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 05:27:21 GMT

I forgot exactly where the river ended and the wall began on the Sipit trail. One of the two conventional gateways on Makiling's Batangas flank, the wooded, rope-lined access to the deforested ridge gave me the first proper mountain workout in four, maybe five months. I could roll out by memory a number of similar mountain flanks with an equivalent level of difficulty, but none of them are as near as this one, within two hours of one of Manila's largest bus depots.

The year 2013 has been a curious four months of backpacking for me. I embarked on my first solo multi-day hike, have managed my one mountain a month desired average, and began a gear retooling process designed to bring me from the world of lightweight hiking and into an ultra-light one. However I have managed a mere two nights sleeping outdoors beneath a tent, because the three last peaks I had climbed were not difficult enough to warrant even an overnight effort. Arayat, Batulao, and now a Makiling traverse, all could each be done in a day.

I had done my first day-hike of Makiling more than two years ago, an off-trail adventure that took me nearly 20 hours to complete. It meant I was unfamiliar with the place names used in conjunction with this mountain, like Sipit and Palanggana, two hamlets that gave their names to trails that merge somewhere before or after the wall. Our previous sortie had started from a sinister place called Kabaongan. This time we arrived at the trailhead at past 8am however, and by the time we passed the traffic of climbers across the rocks it was nearly 2pm.

The Makiling traverse is an extended day hike, meaning you need more than eight hours to get down to the other side, assuming you are not delayed by injury, trail bottlenecks, or plain fatigue. The route to Peak 2 is 27 kilometres, according to the park ranger at Sipit, and I know the descent to the UP Forestry college on the Laguna side is more than eight kilometres long. Mher's stick pedometre measured only 15kms across the entire climb though. But whatever the case, it means you pack as if expecting to be delayed and be forced into making an emergency camp for the night along the trail. This entails bringing emergency food, emergency shelter, a headlamp, more trail water, and body protection against the cold. We caught up with the first group to leave the Sipit trailhead near Peak 2, two young men who had run out of trail water, and they went with us the rest of the way.

Starting from the balete tree above the treeless lower ridge the trail flattens out so that it becomes an easy stroll beneath the canopy as the forest changes from tropical lowland to lower mossy forest above the big rocks just beneath Peak 3. We heard a Philippine hanging parrot, or colasisi, along with a fruit dove, a coppersmith barbet and a brush cuckoo amongst the trees, but I could not quite find them with my full-size binoculars. Birding and climbing do not mix, as I should know by now, though I never seem to learn. One of the young men from the other groups we met along the trail asked if I belonged to a club, so I said sure, we're AMCI, but it turns out he noticed the binoculars and that we both belonged to the Wild Bird Club.

The Makiling ridgetops are a beautiful, largely undisturbed patch of forest, but are quite a challenge to navigate, especially in the rain-free heat of April. It's an obstacle course of fallen trunks, wayward roots and steep and muddy drops that tend to sap your strength in the heat of early afternoon, most especially for tall climbers who have to go down on all fours, as well as vertically-challenged ones who have trouble negotiating the slippery drops.

Learning from the experience of 2010 I packed a headlamp as usual and a lot of trail water. My day pack, a heavy, conventional 32-litre internal-frame one, contained a disposable raincoat, a folding trek pole that I did not use, made-in-Malaysia canned fish and coffee from Jepay, who was visiting from Singapore, my wash-up clothes, anti-bug lotion and sublock, packed lunch and the binocular case. The pack weighed about 8.5kg. I intend to carry about the same weight during multi-day expeditions in the future, using much-lighter gear.

Once you've it past Peak 2 you start wondering where Peak 1 is. It's not on the trail though, and instead it's a straight descent down to a rocky forest road on the lip of a deep, forested gully. You go under massive dipterocarps, trees that must have sprouted during the anti-colonial revolt against Spain, but then the road gets boring after a while. Stepping on rocks is also uncomfortable, punishing on the balls of the feet as well as your knees. Once we got to the coconut stalls above the College of Forestry, we rode motorbikes down to the college town to avoid taking the last 4K on foot.

CHEAP HOLS FOR JOURNOS

Sat, 23 Feb 2013 13:35:36 GMT

This came out in the annual Prospects magazine of the Foreign Correspondents Association last month. I remembered I had been assigned to write the piece when a colleague vaguely dangling some form of access to Tibet approached me tonight and asked if I could take him on hikes too. I told him I didn't do mountains abroad but that he could apply to join our BMC programme come June:

In the first 11 months of 2012 I spent 24 days -- nearly a month -- toiling up and down Philippine mountains. As a write this, I am loading up my backpack for another weekend up there just before Christmas, rounding it off to four weeks for the year. Taking up this sport, or hobby, or whatever else you may choose to call it calls for a major investment of your time.

It is however time well spent in a profession where one works bad or uneven hours, is forced to eat bad food, and spend time in less than ideal environments.

The mountains are a world away from that which most of my fellow journalists -- or fellow Filipinos for that matter -- will ever experience in their entire lives. Savage beauty is a term we like to throw about in our copy every time we write about the frequent natural disasters that visit our islands, but few really experience it themselves. We do, every time we ford a river or raft downstream, with our packs as rafts, not knowing whether we would live to tell about it; each time we step on the tops of jagged rocks with cliffs on both sides of us; or rappel down deep drops with no safety harnesses. We feel it each time we hunker down at camp as wind and torrential rain pound our tents, or when we curl up inside a rolled sheet of tarpaulin on the trail to wait out the night because we had lost our way in the dark. I have survived a rampaging forest fire. I have also lost two dear friends to the mountains in just six years.

Our days are long, and sometimes they extend into the night. The packs are heavy, and the weather can change abruptly, brutally. Walking vertically on narrow trails is slow going, maybe a kilometre an hour. Mud is our ever-present company, we go without showers for days on end using a single set of clothing.

But oh, the rewards! The postcard-perfect pictures and video clips that we bring home and share with friends and family cannot possibly approximate the real experience. I have pitched a tent on a clearing surrounded by dwarf bamboo, by cloud forests, and on top of lichens. I've gotten up to a white dawn where everything was coated in fog. I have walked on trails carpeted with green moss, under thin, ghostly trees with crooked boles shaped by the high winds, and over fields of giant boulders flecked with the caked sulphur from fumes spouting from volcanic vents.

A big bonus is acquiring the discipline necessary to enjoy this pursuit. I had taken it up fairly late, and as a result I sometimes climb with people only a few months older than my daughter. This forces me to train all year round, mostly through long-distance running, to be able to keep up with younger people. I am a lot healthier than most people my age, or even people half my age

BIRDING KITANGLAD AND DULANG-DULANG

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 03:50:22 GMT

The search for the strange night bird called the Philippine frogmouth was momentarily halted as our team leader and our bird guide debated in the dark. Ruth had the world's learned ornithologists on her side with a digital recording of the sepulchral creature's call, but Carlito, with 59 years' actual experience listening to songs of the 306 bird species that call the Kitanglad range their home, insisted the pitch was wrong. He has the enviable talent of imitating bird calls, and the astounding ability to deploy these sounds alternately at any one time, say between a woodcock and a scops owl. The only surprise for us was that he did not mimic the frogmouth call right there and then to coax it out of hiding.

In the end Carlito found the bird after several false dawns, dragging the rest of the team, some having already changed into their bed clothes, through the thickets to its perch. Jasmin won the lottery with a rare Canon SX40 picture of the grotesque-looking brown thing, its huge wide mouth really shaped like that of a frog.

The four-day sortie in Bukidnon can be likened to tourism with brains and a conscience, a pursuit where participants race against time travelling to the remotest corners of the world to see rare creatures before they are extirpated by the activities of man. Listed in one guide as one of the top 100 birdwatching sites in the world, Dalwangan, near the provincial capital Malaybalay, offers the best chance to see some of the rarest birds in their natural habitats, including the great Philippine eagle, a vast variety of fruit-eating forest doves and pigeons, hornbills, parrots and forest kingfishers, the creature-from-a-comic-book-looking Apo myna, two of the rarest Philippine sunbirds, the Apo and the grey-hooded species, and of course the Bukidnon woodcock, a large, snipe-type of ground-skulking bird that takes flight only at dawn and dusk. At times, birding became secondary as there was much, much more to see. Ruth rounded up five of the other younger members of the Wild Bird Club -- Paula, Charlie, Des, Jasmin and Abby -- and I brought along my kid sister Grace for a trip that took nearly a year to plan. When it came time to board the plane I almost missed it as I had forgotten the flight dates.

Much of the trip involved explorations of pocket forests on the north bank of the Sawaga river that echoed with the haunting call of the brush cuckoo. We braved leech bites in a vast plateau, much of which had been converted into farmland and which brought in other, more common types of birds adapted to living in grassy, wide-open spaces. Mud was the element that bound the two, which required our team to wear farmer boots, though I stuck to trekking shoes. One afternoon on our way back from the forest below Mount Dulang-Dulang, the country's second-tallest peak, we saw at least 50 yellow wagtails congregating on a field where farmers were sowing potatoes. As we passed into the lower boundary of the Mount Kitanglad National Park in one of these full-day sorties, we heard the unmistakable roar of a chainsaw motor. If there were any form of enforcement against felling trees, I could not see any sign of it.

For somebody more used to extreme backpacking, our base camp the Del Monte lodge at 1,325 metres above sea level was luxury accommodations. The lodge offered a mattress and a bedsheet under a roof, the option of beach tents, running water, a dining table and a cook plus unlimited coffee, which was helpful as ambient temperatures dropped to 15 Celsius at night. A picture of the deceased Tim Fisher, a pioneer in Philippine birding, adorns the lodge kitchen. When I climbed the range's two highest peaks less than three years ago, I carried my own tent, had to fight off hypothermia in early afternoon, and was able to identify only one bird, the olive-capped flowerpecker. This time, our birdwatching sorties took us up to 1,560masl to the eagle viewing deck, and we reached up to 1,790masl, atop one of the subsidiary peaks of Dulang-Dulang, in our search for the Apo sunbird, its breast a shock of glorious yellow washed with orange flecks under the canopy of a forest recently ravaged by Typhoon Bopha.

I padded my life list to 217 with 25 new species, including the beautiful Mugimaki flycatcher, the flame-breasted flowerpecker, and the strangely named cinnamon ibon. Apart from the Apo myna, woodcock and white-cheeked bullfinch, I finally saw Philippine hanging parrots in the wild, huge and powerful swifts called purple needletails, and even my first-ever naked-faced spiderhunter. I was intrigued by the beautiful song of the white-browed shortwing but failed to spot it. Nor did I lay eyes on the Philippine eagle -- only Des did, from afar -- but then the highlight of the trip for me turned out to be meeting a five-star birdwatching guide like Carlito himself. These should be enough incentives for us to make a return trip sometime.

S.O.S. ARAYAT

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 00:45:37 GMT

On Sunday afternoons ox-drawn carts roll past the ranger station of the Mount Arayat National Park, carrying sooty, 30-kilogramme sacks filled with charcoal.

If you find the scene bucolic rather than tragic, or worse, if you see nothing wrong with this mental picture, you are not an aberration. It seems most Filipinos as well as officialdom cynically feel the same too.

Trekking up Mount Arayat is on a wish list that is rekindled each time I see its silhouette in the morning haze during frequent birding visits the remnants of the Candaba swamps. It finally happened yesterday after I invited myself to a reunion day climb that Carmel had organised for her 2008 AMCI batch. She had wanted to bring them up the completely logged out hills of Talamitam or Batulao in Batangas, but I suggested they do a mountain with a real forest instead.

We chose to climb its south peak, the one off a highway leading to Cabiao and the more popular of the two it appears. It was a good place as any to check whether I had mucked up the altimeter calibration of the Suunto. I had the Mall of Asia ferris wheel base at five metres above sea level, the Arayat ranger station at 90masl, and the peak at 920masl. I climbed a big tree for more when we reached the summit, but it only added five more metres.

Some from my team picked up candy and junk food wrappers dropped on the trail by unschooled backpackers, but we were really fiddling with minor detail while the forest burned. The lower slopes are a wasteland of tree stumps and burnt shrubbery. We passed by numerous huge, sinister-looking mounds of earth that emitted smoke. For the uninitiated these are tree crematoriums, where the trunks of the slaughtered trees are buried to be cured by fire and turned into charcoal. One of the charcoal-makers told me later each sack weighed 30kg and sold for 270 pesos. So you do the math and weep. It seems we're selling our forests at nine pesos a kilo. Sad.

Apart from the environmental disaster below, the mountain does have a beautiful and near-pristine lowland forest cover. After about an hour, we were relieved to finally get past all the burning and into the shade, where we followed an ancient rockfall up its slope. Arayat is considered an inactive volcano, and the trail beneath the forest was bone-dry. Katrice saw a white-throated kingfisher perched really close and we also heard tailorbirds, coppersmith barbets, Philippine bulbul, as well as flowerpeckers and sunbirds, species both unknown. The trail is robust if deceptively short. It shredded Tinka's three-year-old trek shoes, for one. Carrying just a hydration pack also stuffed with a headlamp, a raincoat and my packed lunch, plus an extra litre bottle of water on a clip, I reached the summit after just two hours and 35 minutes tucked in at the back of our lead group of Josh, Grace from the 2011 batch, Rol and Beth. We set about laying out a picnic mat, brewing coffee using Josh's butane stove, and eating bagel personally recommended by Gloria Diaz (fair-skinned, with varicose veins, but engaging, according to Grace). This pack took just 63 minutes to reach the ranger station later, when they descended at a run.

Team leader Carmel, Bojo (2004), and most of the rest of the 2008 party -- Katrice, Effie, Tinka, and Howard followed up the summit camp site soon after we had drank the first pot of coffee. Froi, who carried his son on his shoulders, only reached a stone view deck just below 700masl where the toddler went to sleep on the flat rock overlooking the Pampanga basin.

I marked the end of the treeline at 405 masl. As we also saw a still-burning camp fire at the summit I fear this line will be much higher if and when I decide to go back. I suspect the campfire was set up by the group of campers who had stayed the previous night. We met them on the way up. I doused the embers with precious trail water, but a second group of day trekkers that came up after us later used it again to fry hotdogs. Hopeless. I wondered why they were carrying such big packs, but their big wok explained it all.

Though we were told by the locals the park ranger's office was open only six days a week, I saw a truckload of soldiers from a local military detachment outside when we got back, so it's really a question of political will, rather than resources, at least on the enforcement side.

BUCKET LIST

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 03:52:48 GMT

This wild idea started to germinate, I think, whilst chatting with an upland farmer in Ekip, towards the end of my first solo multi-day hike earlier this month. He said his grandfather, who got to live for 101 years, regularly walked to Baguio at a time when the Ambuklao road was scores of years away from being built. The trek through the mountains, probably a lot longer than the road distance of about 60 kilometres each way, was a two-day undertaking when they had heavy burdens on their shoulders, he said, but just a day or so if they were in a hurry.

And then it hit me: I no longer want to run another marathon nor attempt a 100-kilometre trail ultra or a 100-mile road race. Neither do I want to be a TNF tourist doing the Seven Summits. I want to do something grand, so out of this world in the Philippine context that no person had ever done it before (as far as I know). I want to walk the entire north-south length of the Cordillera range in one go, preferably alone, while I still have the strength to do so.

The country's most formidable mountain range starts from the San Roque dam near San Manuel, Pangasinan, and goes north by 280 kilometres (174 miles), as the crow flies, through its highest point on Mount Pulag and at least 15 towns down to Claveria in Cagayan, on Pasaleng Bay, where the South China Sea meets the waters of the Pacific. While there's no substitute to climbing it, the immensity of the range is best viewed while aboard a low-flying small plane.

The literature on the subject is miserably thin. I am aware that my club walked the Aguinaldo Trail from Bayambang, Pangasinan, across one section of the southern Cordillera and then over the Sierra Madre nearly 15 years ago, taking them about two months with multiple resupply points to reach Palanan in Isabela. I have read about a group of five young people from Baguio completing a 38-day, 350-kilometre central Cordillera traverse from Baguio to Tadian back in the summer of 2005, though for this one apparently the hiking was only secondary since apparently they did not bring their own shelters and broke bread with their host communities, according to newspaper accounts. If I were to do the entire length though I would probably have to use part of of their route.

The route broadly follows the Benguet valleys bisected by the Agno, the country's third-largest river system, up to its source on Mount Data and then on through Mountain Province, Kalinga and the foothills of Apayao, through towns like Itogon, Atok, Buguias, Sabangan, Bontoc, Sadanga, Tinglayan, Balbalan, Pinukpuk, Conner, Kabugao, Calanasan, and Adams. My club is already doing portions of these trails -- I am familiar with the one that goes up from Tadian to Sagada by way of Bagnen, a village in Bauko, and of course I had just done the Japas-Ekip traverse alone myself in Bokod.

The key challenge is to find the old pathways linking the main towns and used by the mountain people of old, up across peaks, rivers and forests -- before the Halsema, the highway up there in the clouds, was built -- and then connect these forgotten paths so that they become one seamless trail broadly going from south to north. Researching the trail itself would probably be worth a masteral thesis subject. It would be imperative that the trail avoid as much of the highway itself, which would rob the undertaking of most of its attractions I believe.

The Cordillera Trail would be dwarfed by the big trails used by through hikers in the United States that span a continent. The Appalachian Trail stretches 2,178 miles (3,505 kilometres), by comparison and the Pacific Crest Trail is even longer, at 2,650 miles (4,265 kilometres), three times the length of the Philippines. There's even one called North Country that is 4,600 miles (7,403 kilometres) long.

The difference is that no one is doing this, much less on a regular basis, in the Philippines at the moment. For this to be realised would require a long break from work, a lot of reconnaissance, and major logistical planning and execution. I would conservatively say the trail itself would take up to three months to complete --two to three weeks, if done through existing roads -- but unlike in established trails elsewhere, one probably would not find the supplies required along the towns on the way, so they have to be pre-positioned, either that or brought up just in time by friends and colleagues.

So what do you think?

CLIMBING WITH SAILCLOTH

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 16:36:13 GMT

For the second mountain in a row last week climbed in a new backpack, the Porter (right, in white), made by Hyperlite Mountain Gear, in my search for an all-purpose, ultra-light rucksack. Initial impressions? I liked most of the experience.

Ultra-light manufacturers make their bread and butter with new fabrics, simplified design and forcing customers to make acceptable compromises. Compared with the frame-less, stay-less Gossamer Gear G4 (green and black, left), the Porter, while 400 grammes heavier at 865g, both carries and loads better because of the latter's optional aluminium stays, which I chose to retain, that give it shape and rigidity, and the full-size hipbelt, making for more efficient weight transfer from the shoulder to the thigh muscles. The Porter is designed to stand independently unlike all the other previous backpacks I had had -- five as of last count. The two new ones are about the same size, give or take four litres' worth of volume. Both have at least 20 litres more capacity than the at least twice-heavier traditional internal-frame-style Deuter Trail 32 (mustard, centre) that I had started using for multi-day climbs since March last year. The Porter felt comfortable carrying 12 kilogrammes, close to its maximum recommended capacity of 13.6kg. But it carried even better when it was down to 6.9kg by the third day.

Both my lighter packs have roll-top openings, dispensing with the redundant top-pocket lid used in the Deuter and other conventional packs. But whilst the G4 is fitted out with huge, wraparound side and front pouch pockets, the Porter is as clean as a whistle. There are no recesses to stick your gear into outside the pack, excluding the pair of daisy chains that run down its length. While I liked the idea of the G4, I have had no trouble adopting to the Porter so far. I previously put a litre of water in a built-in side pocket of my pack, but for this one I bought a bottle clip which I attached to the daisy chain on the pack strap. I will have to buy a new carabiner though, because the Coleman that came with the clip is worthless and broke even before it got to the trail head. Having said that, my last climb was a cold-weather affair and I hardly drank water along the trail, so I do not know if accessing the bottle clipped onto my shoulder strap at the normal rate of use would not cause too much inconvenience.

Like the G4's thin ripstop nylon, the Porter is made of material more commonly associated with high-end backpacking tents, in this case a waterproof cuben fibre-polyester composite, similar to sailcloth. I have read reviews about the fabric de-laminating -- basically disintegrating after a given time period, along with its supposed tendency to puncture from repeated contact with rocky or rough surfaces. As of now I am not competent to pass judgment on that, nor do I know how it will resist thorns that one encounters a lot along Philippine mountain trails, hazards that rip into Dyneema even, which is supposedly a tougher fabric than cuben.

However, I can say that the colour is not ideal. White is probably perfect for snow camping, but we are in the tropics. There is a lot of non-white surfaces before or after the trailhead -- mud, charcoal, grime, tree sap, cattle dung, and even motor oil, unfortunately, inside the cargo bays of buses so you end up needing to carry a pack cover on your way to a climb. A waste of valuable grammes.

THE FIRST SOLO TREK OF PURGATORY

Sat, 19 Jan 2013 01:28:56 GMT

As the coldest night of the year hit the Philippines I was in a wind-tossed tent high up on a southwestern Cordillera mountaintop, furiously digging through the contents of my backpack for something, anything, to cover my hands. I realised I had neglected to bring gloves and there was little left in there to resist the Siberian visitor's chilly handshake. The stuff sacks had been turned into a second pair of socks, and the bin liner had been deployed to take the place of the also-absent sleeping bag. I was already wearing all the three pairs of clothing I had with me plus my wool balaclava. Baguio, down below, was down to 11 Celsius, I heard later, so you could just imagine how it felt up there. In my headlong pursuit of the nirvana of ultra-light pack loads I had foolishly disregarded my own rule of the thumb of always bringing a mummy bag for peaks above 2,000 metres, and Mount Pack was nearly 300m over that line. That left the white backpack itself, made of sailcloth, and my trekking socks. The former offered no comfort whatsoever, so I made do with the slightly soggy latter.

When smoke from the burning brush set alight by migrant farmers lifts from the skirts of the mountains east of the Ambuklao dam, one could actually see the summit of Pack. It is eight kilometres into a mostly pleasant and easy trail opened last year by the municipal government of Bokod, and one they had rather inappropriately named the "Mount Purgatory Traverse". In truth there are only two true peaks of note in the 21.5K trail, the other being its high point of 2,325masl Mount Kom-kompol, at 17K. About 300 backpackers have used the trail since it opened in April last year, according to the municipal tourism officer Jason, including two groups of my friends in November and December but that according to him and John, the head of the local guide association, I was the first one to finish a traverse solo. They had a Brit guy eight years younger than I am who went up the previous week, the guides' president said, but he turned back after the first peak before dark.

Of course, one cannot really go traipsing up alone in a trail controlled by the government. I was required to hire a guide for 500 pesos a day, a boon to the local economy, but I was determined to keep to the spirit of my undertaking, so we arranged for the 47-year-old guide Jerico to walk behind me at all times and not to attempt to help me in any way except to warn me that I had made the wrong turn. That suited him fine, since, while I was sure I could not hold a candle to him in bush craft or walking uphill, he came to the trek even less prepared for the three-day sortie -- no knife, no stove nor pots, no mess kit, no tent, and no food apart from a small pack of crackers. He had borrowed an unlined sleeping bag, but I bet the guide association had not reckoned with a visitor who deliberately left his tent floor home while demanding to be allowed to trek alone. In the end we had to snip the edges off his borrowed sackcloth to serve as his sleeping pad, the poor guy. He was lucky it did not rain. We used my pot covers for plates and I ate with my bare hands in solidarity, deploying my spork as serving spoon and ladle. To be fair he ate the worst I could serve up over three days, and that is saying a lot. That is, except for the angel-hair pasta with a ready-made green slime of a sauce called "cheesy pesto", which he would not touch if his life depended on it. At the second camp site I sent him home to his wife to put him out of his misery, so truly got to spend time alone at last. The wife sent up brewed coffee and boiled yams in gratitude.

Tourism appears to be the preferred answer of the local governments of the Cordilleras to arrest the wholesale conversion of its forests for farming. The first seven kilometres of the trail from Japas, pronounced the northern European way, is an environmental disaster. The people of Mangakew, the first hamlet, have mowed down most of their pine trees for kindling and housing, and further up at Duacan and Bangtinen, recent arrivals from Kayapa across the mountains were busy setting fire to brush land that had taken the place of trees they had cut down to build their homes. This destruction allowed them to plant more cabbage. Jerico said big game had all but disappeared and they were down to trapping civets and birds for protein. On the hike down Kom-kompol I saw no less than seven snares laid along the trail itself, and a huge pile of bird feathers on the side of the path. A newly built road across the mountain from the east is certain to add economic impetus to this depressing sight. For sure guide fees would help, but to what extent? There are 18 of them guides currently, but half of January had gone by the time I arrived by bus at Japas and I was only the second visitor for the month on what is supposed to be their peak tourist season.

The best part of the trail is the one with the forest cover, beginning from the Mount Pack tree line at 7K and ending with the vast and wonderful Tinengan pine forest above the hamlet of Ekip, west of Kom-kompol, at about 21K. I negotiated large parts of that downhill section at a controlled run, for the sheer joy of it. One little mistake and off you go down a steep cliff all the way to the river below. By that time my pack load was down to 6.9 kilogrammes, from 12kg originally.Otherwise this was the only climb I could remember where I kept my hands tucked in my pockets, so low was the temperature beneath the canopy.

The beauty and diversity of the cloud forests of Kom-kompol, and most especially Pack, are for me the highlights of the climb, with the fantastic 300-degree views of the second camp site at Tangbaw, a mountain hamlet ensconced among pine groves at 14K, as an added bonus. From the Pack summit at daybreak the climber is afforded a unique panoramic view of the bald top of Mount Pulag to the north and its iconic sea of clouds, and from Tangbaw you can take pictures all day of distant Pulag and nearby peaks framed by the massive boles of nearby pines. What was probably a 10-hour through hike from end to end stretched into 12.5 hours over three days for me as I got sidetracked photographing lichen and moss growing on tree trunks, ground burrows of possible cloud rats, wild orchids in bloom, and fruiting wild trees between Ekip and the village of Naswak where I saw with my bare eyes a flaming sunbird and a flock of pinicola race of blue-headed fantails. Next time I will carry a proper set of binoculars, and maybe even return to this stretch to bird it properly, perhaps with a long lens and tripod. There were grey wagtails, elegant tits, and what I thought was a red crossbill amongst the pines, but was frustrated by my inability to identify the others, including one that behaved like a tree-climbing nuthatch. Jerico the guide had all their names and down to their nesting habits pat in the local dialect, but as we only understood each other in Ilocano that added to my frustration. Kakak, he said of the tits, and the wagtails were asib. His help was invaluable though in my attempt to gain a better understanding of the local culture, as well as the economic choices that they make that lead them to harm the environment.

Now this is not to nitpick, but somebody ought to tell the Bokod government that their treasure is wonderful as is, and heavy and clumsy human hands would not improve on Mother Nature. They have actually cut down more trees to create summit "viewdecks" for Pack and Kom-kompol, complete with benches and even, at Tangbaw, picnic tables made from the trunks of the massacred trees, and for Kom-kompol especially, the result was grotesque. They built handrails atop the cliff face overlooking Mount Pulag, while at Pack they also sawed off trees on three sides of the summit for views of Pulag, Kayapa, and Bokod. They also terraced some of the trails to create stairways with cut logs, and the ugly remains of wood fires were evident at most clearings. They even built a wooden lodge, Aponan, at the T-junction between Tangbaw and Naswak for "campers without tents" , who I think are not worthy of the name. Some group apparently demanded to use the Tangbaw schoolrooms during a recent trek because they had not brought tents for themselves, the lazy brats. Better to let the climbers carry their own gear, or let them hire locals as porters, and let them climb atop the trees themselves if they want beautiful pictures. Art takes effort. Climbers who lack essential gear should be fined or turned back, since if something bad happens to them on the trail owing to their stupidity they will still be the concern as well as responsibility of the local government unit.

If I were to redesign this trail I would cut the Japas, Mangakew, Duacan and Bangtinen portions out and make Ekip the trail head. This way, the first summit assault would take half a day and allow for a night camp either at Tangbaw or Pack, depending on the size of the party, before returning to Ekip. The villages below it that line an 8.5K stretch of the Agno river, Pethal and Karao, can also be dispensed with as both are rather ordinary, at first glance at least. Gina Epe's jeeps could bring climb parties directly to Ekip, and smaller groups could ride motorcycles.

FRENCH BREAD FOR STAYS

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 16:33:21 GMT

When the baker was kneading the 20-inch dough for the French bread that we brought up the mountain just before Christmas, he would never have imagined that the hard-crust loaves would be used as improvised spines for my new backpack. I had instantly seen the possibility when we distributed the food load, and volunteered to carry the bulky items. The bread and the spaghetti noodles became pack stays. Only the lettuce did not serve a dual purpose.

There were 11 of us -- Yoshi, Grace, Lyka, CY, Katrice, Froi, Rol, Josh, Niel, Bossing and I -- for the supposed comeback climb of our jet-lagged friend Danna, who failed to show up. Three vehicles deposited us to within an hour of the forest line of Tarak Ridge, a now popular route on Mount Mariveles. Since just three of us arrived on time however, we only started the trek at noon, with ramifications later on at night.

Multipurpose is a byword of the ultralight crowd, the concept of carrying only items that serve more than one purpose: a rain jacket for example, instead of a raincoat plus a non-waterproof shell, or using your tent stakes to dig cat holes instead of bringing a trowel. For the Gossamer Gear G4, the buyer has to provide the padding for the optional hip belt himself, in my case wool socks. The pack also lacks either a plastic or aluminium frame or stay, and without them it collapses like a pile of dirty laundry.

CY said he had never climbed here before, which is not surprising. We use the mountain's more difficult trails in the wet season for training climbs, and apprentices who are given the option to pick three out of four peaks often give this brute a miss. It is actually a much tamer animal in the dry season. Niel and Katrice brought pocketbooks to read on the trail, while Bossing carried three litres of red wine, big speakers for his iPod, and cooked soup with a slow-burn Trangia alcohol stove when we stopped at the Papaya River (Pangolisan River in topo maps). Froi packed a rope hammock, and our grocery items also included (perhaps I should insert a food pornography warning here) apples, grapes, canned pineapples, eggs, bacon, ham, a ball of Edam cheese, black olives, and many types of instant noodles. It was that type of a climb.

My pack weighs just 465 grammes. Imagine stuffing your tent, stove and fuel bottle, and sleeping pad into your jacket pockets and setting off for the wilderness. It's made of ripstop nylon, like a tent fly really, except there is no silicone waterproofing. The pack lacks a top load or zippers or other stuff you don't really need, and makes do with a simple drawstring and cord lock. The front and side mesh pockets are enormous, the ones at the side swallows two Platypus 2-litres bottles each. The hip belt was adequate, though I have yet to convince myself that this the proper pack for long-distance hikes. Form is function, one soon learns. Loading the limp G4 requires some practice and trial-and-error. The home-made stiffeners at the back do not transfer all the weight to the thigh muscles. With its signature wide shoulder straps, it was not much of an issue on a five-hour trek, but what if, as it often happens, the trail is 12 hours long?.

I had passed the so-called Japanese Garden, the ridge wall with crumbling rock with a carpet of moss and fern, two times before, one in each way, but I had never seen how it looked at dusk. So I insisted that we inject some novelty in what would otherwise be a routine "fun climb", bypassing Tarak Ridge and heading for the ledge on top, giving us a view of the Bataan peak, the tallest of several outcrops around the giant crater of this volcano. We found several groups already at the traditional camp site. Later on Bossing would complain about the lack of a flat space for pitching tents, and how a rock was beneath the middle of his tent floor at our exclusive view-deck camp. For me the view here trumps everything else though. Most of our team reached the ledge, just under 1,200 metres above the mouth of Manila Bay at dusk, but when darkness came without CY, I felt guilty and went down to help Lyka bring him up.

Our team leader/sweeper said she reached Tarak Ridge at 5:30 pm but had to stop to let him catch up. During the hour-long wait she said three giant brown rats attacked her backpack, perhaps trying to get at the food inside. Attacked by giant rats! Hilarious. Lester had warned us about this new danger before, but Lyka was singled out by the vermin.

At one point during my solo descent in the dark I found myself hitting a dead end in the fog. I retraced my steps in mild panic until I found the right one and decided to shut off the headlamp awhile and wait. The wind was rising and the air was moist, and I regretted not wearing my rain jacket. From time to time I would shout out their names, but there was no response, so I sat and waited some more.

The G4 is too big for my purpose, I think. I had gone light enough that even after loading up two extra litres of water at Papaya the pack weighs less than 10 kilogrammes. The main pack alone is 52 litres, and I'd gone with 32L for a five-day climb the previous month! It's amazing how little one really needs to enjoy the outdoors. Once you get the hang of it, there is no going back, and in any case, you would not be able to load more than 13kg anyway as you would tear the pack material. The mild, dry conditions of the Mariveles climb meant that I could, theoretically, swap it for an even lighter, smaller ultralight pack.The trouble though is that the smaller-capacity they have, the less need they have for a hip belt, which tends to be eliminated by the manufacturer. A hip belt is sine qua non for me though, since weight on the shoulders would surely kill the fun of it.

It was to be about 30 minutes before I heard Lyka's voice and saw their headlamp beams. She was sweeping from the front, as we say in this sport, walking ahead of the colleague requiring assistance, guidance or company, or all of the above. "No way is this a fun climb, man," CY said. He is a pleasant guy and had remarkably kept his cool. Trekking in the dark, even with a headlamp is not a pleasant business, and it gets worse in wet, muddy conditions prevailing during training climbs. The dwarf forest between the traditional camp site and Tarak peak is small but almost vertical and the trail lined with sharp rocks. He brushed off all my attempts to relieve him of his backpack. Good man, I had helped him run 15 kilometres of a mountain trail in under two hours two years ago to pass our club's basic mountaineering course, so I knew he is made of the right stuff. The rest of the team cheered lustily when he finally showed up at the camp site just before 8pm. Dinner was already being served.

PALEMLEM IN TRAIL RUNNERS

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 18:47:39 GMT

We realised the trail had indeed "closed", in the quaint woodsman-Ilocano of our Isneg guide Teresa, soon after we climbed out of the long gully that bore the unmistakable signature of ravenous wild hog snouts rooting for earthworms. It was early evening two nights after the full moon and we could clearly see the silhouette of the ridgetop. However her thin machete made little headway in "reopening" it in the dark, with bamboo thickets barring the way beneath the low trees and with just our headlamps to help us find the "door". She and three young local men had taken us to a logging trail up one of the two peaks of Mount Palemlem, hoping to compensate for our very late start at 3pm. The other, more familiar trail up the other peak is steeper and more forested, she said, and she doubted we -- Kim, Pie, Bugsy, Mher, Jackie, CJ, Eds and I -- would make it to its tiny summit clearing before dark.

The group made an altitude gain of 800 metres in about four hours, but we decided we were up north for a fun climb, not an exploration climb, so we started looking for a bivouac site, not an easy nor pleasant task in thickets crawling with blood-sucking leeches. We settled on a gully just below the ridge beneath a row of pandan palms, their thorny exposed roots growing out of their trunks and burrowing into the ground, like montane versions of coastal mangrove forests. There was a half-eaten pandan fruit,big as a breadfruit, on the ground that Mher said had been gnawed by a chicken lizard. We displaced an irate, giant stick insect that turned out to be photogenic.

My colleagues said it was more difficult than advertised, but in truth I climbed without much effort. The trail was steep in parts but pleasant, with a wealth of flora comparable to those found in the country's top forest parks. Discounting the glacial pace of the team's RCJ bus and the rough, dusty 13-kilometre dirt-road ride up from the highway, the hill town of Adams, the trail head to Palemlem, lies in one of the most beautiful corners of Ilocos Norte, close to Cagayan and Apayao and near Pasaleng Bay, the Patapat viaduct and the windmills of Bangui. A previous visit to the town's many waterfalls by our team leader Bugsy and Jackie in the summer got us all excited about this mountain. Our host, the town treasurer Mrs. Medrano, sent us off with a fabulous lunch feast of river fry, two dishes of banana flowers -- one cooked in coconut milk and the other in soya -- native chicken broth and red mountain rice.

The reason I felt good was that I was amazingly succeeding in my effort to push the envelope of the possible in Philippine mountaineering. Hauling a day pack weighing less than 11 kilogrammes, four litres of water included and with a rain jacket and pants in place of a sleeping bag and shelI jacket I was flying up its slopes shod only in a pair of worn, patched-up New Balance trail running shoes weighing well under 900 grammes, about a third of the weight of my old backpacking boots. The weight of your footwear is supposed to translate into five times that on your back, so imagine the relief much lighter shoes give you. I was concerned the running shoes would disintegrate in the mud typical of Philippine mountains, but the forest floor of this one was dry for the most part. The toe boxes actually felt a lot roomier than those in my old boots, and the following day I completed the descent in just two hours. They only got wet when we stopped by a river near our pickup point to rinse the day-old dust on my hair.

Anticipating a tiny campsite, I used a conventional solo dome tent for this climb, which added to my pack weight. Next time my total load for overnight climbs would be 8kg tops, still very heavy compared to the tiny rucksacks slung on the shoulders of the guides, who also wore dungarees and flip-flops. They went up with just a litre each in trail water and carried not one tent nor ground sheet, so in the end we lent them our kitchen parawing and one tarp so they would not shiver to death at night. They used the tarp as communal blanket after lining the forest floor beneath it with leaves. When I offered them coffee in the morning they sliced their empty water containers in two and used the bottom halves as mugs.

Palemlem has an amazing bird life, replete with the car-backing-up warning sound of tailor birds. An unknown songbird began its melodious spiel as soon as I rose from my windshield-visor sleeping pad, but it was gone by the time I got out. It's a pity that Palemlem, like most mountains on the Ilocos side of the Cordilleras, are heavily exploited by the locals. The biggest trees on its lower slopes -- tanguile, almaciga, banglas were among those identified by Teresa -- are being cut down for housing materials, while on its middle levels the sides of the trail are mined with pressure-triggered bird snares that Teresa said trapped both jungle fowl and the pandan sap-loving civets. In all probability they are also trapping and eating pittas -- the fabled bannatiran of Ilocos -- and other increasingly rare birds that inhabit the forest floor. At least its slopes are not being ritually burnt each year by hunters, unlike those in other parts of the Ilocos.

The near-unbroken forest cover meant there was hardly any views beyond tree trunks, mushrooms, wild flowers, thorny rattan palms, and rotting leaves and logs,though they looked lovely in the tiny slices of sunlight piercing through the canopy. At the campsite I had to climb to the top of a tree to get a view of the peak that we missed. From that vantage point the bay and the mountains of Claveria looked majestic in the early morning light. We soaked up the beauty of the place and did not start the trek down until 10am. By the time we returned to the trail head lunch was already being served -- river eel and prawn, taro stalks, and more red rice. We agreed we needed to return soon for another climb.

AN UGLY BUT QUITE FUNCTIONAL TENT ALTERNATIVE

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 17:41:47 GMT

I have now used a Mountain Laurel Designs Trailstar in my last five nights in the outdoors and I believe I have a reasonable idea of how the pentagon-shaped single-wall tarp fares in tropical Philippine conditions. During those five nights I managed to pitch it at sea level on a beach as well as atop the country's highest mountain (see photo), and inside a lower montane forest and two hill villages in between. All but one of the camp sites were exposed to the wind.

It is a head-turner, but not for the reasons one might expect. It is huge, it pitches ugly except for the most ideal terrain, and I did choose olive-brown, the shabbiest colour of the lot.

But then it is so light it is just half the weight of the conventional double-wall solo tents in use by a handful of Philippine backpackers who have elected to sleep alone. Excluding a trekking pole that serves to stand it, the entire shelter weighs just 725 grammes even with my choice of relatively heavy MSR Groundhog Y stakes. A two-person dome tent, the go-to shelter in rain-soaked Philippine mountains, weighs more than three times more. Colleagues who were seeing it for the first time could not believe their eyes on first seeing pitched on camp sites. "Don't tell me you're sleeping under that," was the most common reaction. "Where's the floor," and "Where are the walls" are also among the frequently-asked questions. It has helped me reduce my backpack weight by at least five kilogrammes, by my own estimates, since if your pack load is less you do not need to carry a bigger, heavier backpack.

You must ensure it is seam sealed with the silicone gel provided or some other substitute, because rainwater eventually seeps into the seams during the night, and there is no canopy to protect you if that happens as the rain comes down in tiny drips, unless you want to sleep with your raincoat on, as I did on three occasions. I would double-seal it from the outside as well as the inside, a messy undertaking, but you need it for insurance and peace of mind.

Camp site selection is crucial. Filipino backpackers usually have to make do with assigned camp sites, which limits both space and choice, but the rule of the thumb is to avoid depressions where water would pool in case of rain. Remember you don't have the insurance of a batthub tent floor either -- it's just your tarp between you and the ground. Avoid flat, hard bare ground as well as it would be unable to hold water, so your sleeping quarters would be part of the floodway. The usual advice is to choose raised, slightly convex ground.

The raised opening could bring in cold air, if the pitch is not oriented properly, a problem in some camp sites facing bodies of water as the wind tends to shift at least once in your sleep. When I pitched at the Mount Apo summit I eliminated the opening by pegging it to the ground, pulling it out only to get in or out of the shelter. It was ugly, but it worked. I was not killed by the cold. At the other sites I used found sticks, and borrowed a second trekking pole once, to form a door. Other than the soft sand at Subic, where two of 10 stakes were pulled up by the strong wind, I think the shelter is storm-worthy.

Avoid touching the inside of the tent wall during ingress and egress, as such a huge shelter provides a lot of acreage for condensation. You could end up with a soaked back without realising it. The water stays harmless and attached to the inside of the roof otherwise. You would only realise the sheer volume of condensation when you pack the thing.

Sleeping without a tent floor will take some getting used to. For my five-day Apo climb I packed insect repellent lotion as insurance against potential leeches at camp sites. Once you get the hang of it of course, the sheer convenience of the reduced weight would increase your enjoyment of your climbs. Where camp sites allow, and where there is need to carry more water and other provisions, this would become my go-to tent.

THE INCREDIBLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 13:02:52 GMT

These are everything I carried during our five-day traverse climb of Mount Apo via Mount Talomo last week. My total pack weight was 12.12 kilogrammes, with the rest in my pockets, carried by hand or worn. I used a 32-litre day pack for the trip, such an outlandish idea even now that I'd gone and done it. I do believe there are further opportunities to bring the pack weight down to below 10kg eventually. The process begins now, by evaluating the individual contents of the tiny rucksack.

GARMENTS: down jacket, waterproof shell jacket, running shorts, T-shirt, wool socks, slippers, raincoat, 2 stuff sacks, 3 ziploc bags, 2 plastic bags, rubber bands 1.69kgs

I could have done with gloves and pants at the summit camp instead of shorts. I was told the temperature dropped to single-digits deep into the night. Down was insufficient so I was grateful I played safe and did not leave the shell home. I could use a lighter one though. And the raincoat tore after four days.

SLEEP SYSTEM: ground sheet, sleeping bag, windshield visor, emergency blanket, chamois, stuff sack, ziploc, plastic bag 0.81kg

The barest minimum between me and the ground, with the visor as the luxury item. The emergency blanket was unused, which was fine as it weighs virtually nothing. I need to patch two holes on the ground sheet. Opting for an industrial-grade one, though heavier, was a good call.

SHELTER: Trailstar, 10 stakes, stuff sack, silicone seam sealer, rubber band 0.755kg

Perfect for rain-free nights, but the floorless, single-wall shaped tarp was potentially catastrophic for wet ones. The ground flooded on the second night, owing to the wrong choice of camp site (flat, hard bare clay), but it taught me how not to panic and to improvise. No leaks on the canopy on the first night of rain, but worryingly big ones on the next one. I washed the mud off at the Kabacan river, and the seam sealing probably washed off as well. Good thing I had the SilNet, though the tube opening gummed up later after some emergency patch-ups. I did not get to pitch the tent hanging from a tree branch, instead of standing it on a trekking pole. I managed to pitch it in two configurations -- with one panel as the opening, and with a raised corner as the entrance. A lot depends on the camp layout.

Now I have to seam seal the thing again. I wonder if it's worth the effort, since my solo double-wall tent is just too tempting, with just a 700g weight penalty. But with pack loads coming down there is also that tantalising prospect of bringing BOTH (!!) shelters.

ESSENTIALS: lunch box, spork, 5 tissue packs, kernmantle, 15 pills, 2 eye drops, headlamp, 3 batteries, 5 band aid, Off lotion, toothbrush, toothpaste, duct tape, cloth wipe 0.435kg

The bug lotion was unused, and I had one toothpaste sachet too many. The lunch box cover was a passenger too, perhaps I should revert to my the titanium mug and use plastic bags for packed lunches. I used the rope only once -- the shelter was so big it was easier to just hang wet stuff on shrubs underneath it.

STOVE: MSR Whisperlite, stuff sack 0.36kg

I forgot to buy a lighter on getting off the plane in Davao, so we had to borrow from other groups when Alman's failed.

PACK: day pack, 2 bin liners, rubber bands 1.5kgs

Deuter Act Trail 32 for nearly a week out in the wilds. Take a bow, because you'd have to give way to a sub-1kilogramme pack eventually.

FOOD: group meals, 8 granola bars, 1 tin Spanish sardines 2.575kg

Two granola bars too many, and I only forced myself to eat the sardines -- emergency food -- so I would not have to bring it down the mountain again. There was an extra tetra pack of uneaten vegetarian meal as well, from the group load.

WATER: 2litres, 3 containers 2.3kgs

When the pack load dwindled I also started carrying three litres of trail water, which is my real comfort zone, not two. Next time I will use Platypus, a lot lighter than plastic bottles.

FUEL: 1.2litres lighter fluid, 2 fuel bottles 1.7kgs

About 300 millilitres too much, even accounting for a possible extra day on the trail. It would have been nice to have a small fuel bottle instead of the medium.

ITEMS WORN OR CARRIED: hat, distance glasses, arm sleeves, gloves, shirt, compression shorts, trek pants, socks, shoes, trekking pole, camera, phone, sport case, money, ID, keys, knife, bandanna

Phone was worthless, sans a signal, and the bandanna was a passenger. An extra camera battery would have been more useful. The boots are now painful to wear because of tearing above the heel. I thought I'd lost one glove hand so I ditched the other in Digos, but I found the missing one inside the pack when I got home. Otherwise I did not lose any item during the climb.

APOTHEOSIS OF OUR DISTRACTIONS

Wed, 07 Nov 2012 16:23:09 GMT

A day after reaching the endpoint of one of Mount Apo's toughest traverse trails, I found myself sprinting down the length of Perea in a race with the roving Makati tow trucks to the timed curbside parking slots. It helps to be fit, but I would rather not do it again on swollen calves and ankles.

I'd gone to a clinic nearby for an X-ray scan with a feared broken little finger. The irony was that I sustained the painful injury at the shower stall, back at the Davao washup, slipping and falling as I scrubbed away five days' worth of mud, caked blood from scratches, and dried sweat. The doctor just had time to verbally deliver the results and prescriptions -- "Negative, there's no break. Cold compress" -- as I scooted out of her office.

To give an idea of its intensity, the trail tore both legs off Kathy's trekking pants. But the climb itself was relatively incident-free: no major injuries or nasty surprises at numerous river crossings, no members of the party to stretcher out of the trail for medical emergencies, and with a minimum of night treks on a 48-kilometre route that took us from Davao City's Calinan district through Magpet in Cotabato on the way to the summit, then down to Santa Cruz and Digos on the Davao del Sur side.

For half our party, it was a sensory overload of the 64,000 hectare national park, from vast orchards that had taken the place of Apo's lower woodlands, through the gloom of endless mossy forests that rose out from dark swamps, and finally to the the splendour of its main peak, featuring a lake, grasslands with biting winds, and scrub forests dwarfed by the first-timers' new tents.

For the first four days, I stayed mostly at or near the rear of a unit led by Joyce, an amazingly tough kid who was essentially blind for nearly the entire expedition after she lost her glasses on the first day. Twice I had to pull her up as she fell off trail and was left hanging on the edge of cliffs. Our grupetto also included Alan, the nurse Kathy, a big student with disintegrating trek shoes called Emerson, and Leithon. Out in front the group adviser Alman led its two pack mules, Jerry and James in search of prime spots for camp sites.

Day One was a depressing tour of communities trapped in thousands of acres of Cavendish banana plantations, broken only for me by the sight of glossy starlings nesting on the cowl of a street lamp at the trail head. There is something disheartening about stripping off the cover of one of the world's most biologically diverse forest ecosystems. It lays bare the poverty of a people seemingly destined for the rest of their lives to ... tally me banana, as Belafonte sang it. Fruits that fail to meet the standards of size, colour, or shape are chopped into bits and left to dry on the roadside for hog feed. At the first camp site, a community called Utan, the people replaced the trees with a species of tall reed that they grow to make brooms to sell, to generate cash to augment their crop produce. Not surprisingly, one of the communities we passed before reaching the trail head is called the "Garden of Eden", led by one of those messianic types who gain political power by attracting the downtrodden, unschooled masses to his fold.

For our first-time visitors, I would imagine their main concern would have been trail survival, and a feeling of dread at having to face the unknown. Few from my group were whipping out their cameras until we reached Venado lake, halfway into Day Four. By that time mine was nearly drained. The fact that many had to endure night treks on the first two days did not help, particularly on Day Two, where, after completing a 16km slog through an obstacle course of rivers, creeks, swamps and logs, our Dallag camp was hit by a prolonged downpour even before the last two groups to arrive could pitch their tents and cook dinner. Several tents got flooded, and I had to use the chamois myself to mop up the top of the thin tarp separating me from the ground.

I prepared for the climb's expected rigours by severely gutting my pack load. Once we dumped book donations at the mountain hamlet of Sicao, at the edge of the banana farms, I was carrying only about 11 kilogrammes or so. Reviewing my written accounts of previous visits to this mountain over the past four years, I was horrified to learn that I had carried 20kgs during my first, in 2008. I am sure I would be able to trim my load further to under 10kg next time.

Day Three was a short and pleasant stroll as we finally began some serious ascents before spending the night at a wooded valley called Basingon, our only forest camp site during the trip. We finished rather early, and after helping James fetch water from a spring that yielded the precious resource in drips and dribbles, I got to explore the surrounding thickets. I was delighted that Gabo, the leader of the group of Davao-based climbers who acted as our guides, still remembered me from my previous visits. I likewise discovered, thankfully before dusk arrived, that the camp was surrounded by spring-loaded boar traps. I always carried a knife, but I imagined trying to free myself from one would not be a pleasant task.

At Venado on Day Four we flushed a wagtail as we circled the lake to get to the summit, about three hours away. We were supposed to rendezvous with a smaller contingent from my club at lunch before going up together, but by the time my unit arrived it was past noon and they had gone ahead. Locals had erected stalls made of reed on the water's edge to hawk instant noodles, soda, instant coffee, cigarets, boiled eggs, and even packets of rice, as if it were a provincial bus stop. As we were about 600 grammes short we took the opportunity to replenish our cereal supplies, and I actually enjoyed a coffee.

The section between Venado and the summit, I realised, is one of the busiest corridors of the Apo trail. It was as if cattle and horses were being driven up and down the muddy path on a daily basis. On the way up we met about half a dozen groups, some using barefoot porters to haul their packs and thrash down after spending the night at the mountaintop. One guy actually asked how old I was, and one group asked to have their pictures taken with us. There was mutual respect and admiration in the banter. We both knew only a tiny segment of the population are equipped, or would take the trouble, to engage in what we do for fun. About halfway up though the temperature dropped further as rain fell. Kathy switched on her afterburners and left the rest of the group behind. But as one member of our unit began to stall, I decided to hang back on a self-appointed mission to bring this colleague to the summit and safety before dark. Using threats, browbeating and some carrots, we did just that just before 5pm. The cold does something to you, slowing your thinking, your reflexes, and your willpower, which could be dangerous when exposed and in the dark.

Forty-one new members were inducted to the club before midnight, by which time the skies had cleared, leaving us to deal with the cold wind. Not wishing a repeat of my short-term misery on the second night, I went to pitch my tarp amongst a clump of scrub and reeds near the east peak, well away from the soft moss-carpeted mud floor where the rest of the party was camped.

On the last day Alman told the rest of our unit's new members they were now on their own as five of us flew down the boulder field, overtaking all other groups that had left the camp ahead of us. We were to put pressure, according to him, on Niel, the team leader who was laying trail signs in front with Alvin the trail master. Four of us caught up with them just before the treeline. And even though we followed the wrong trail towards the end after an hour-long lunch stop, just after 2pm we were at Tumpis, the first of three communities to be passed before vegetable trucks picked up the entire party at Baruring, about 14K from the summit.

FIVE DAYS, TWO MOUNTAINS, ONE DAY-PACK

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 13:12:50 GMT

It's the new non-winter, sub-alpine standard for the outdoors in the upper latitudes. My friends up in Ilocos were among the earliest exponents in the Philippines, but I doubt it had been done on the scale that I plan on attempting in my next climb: Using a day pack for a five-day sortie, and putting my trust in a single-wall, floor-less shelter to shield me from the elements.

Of the two, the 32-litre pack is the more obvious jaw-dropper. I have yet to meet a person who had used a smaller than 45L rucksack for a traverse hike that includes the country's tallest mountain (this one also takes in a second mountain for size), unless they used porters for their supplies. One colleague who actually took the trouble to weigh his gear for this climb came up with 16 kilogrammes, nearly four more than what I plan to carry. Alman, who takes more than 17kgs on three-day climbs, jokingly asked if I packed a knife so I could gather edible leaves on the trail and live off the land.

Using such as a small pack is only possible once you have taken the deliberate decision to gut its contents. That can be done in either of two ways: making do without some items that you had previously considered as essentials, replacing them with lighter, less bulky versions, or removing superfluous components, like pack covers.

I had used this same pack for my past three climbs, two long overnighters and a three-day outing, all at the height of the country's wet season. It served the purpose well. I now intend to prove that it would be able to carry five days' worth of supplies and essentials as well.

I have approached ultralight backpacking gradually, because this would be the only way for me to afford it. I began by scouring builders' shops to snag cheap gems like disposable raincoats, thinner tarps, and car windshield visors for sleeping pads. I switched to running kits for camp clothes, then plumped for solo tents. I am still using some relatively heavy equipment that I call legacy items -- the full-feature though smaller backpack, the white-gas stove and fuel bottles, the heavy shell and relatively heavy groundsheet, full-size headlamp, and conventional cooking. I always climb with a group that considers hot meals a de rigueur after all, so there are built-in limitations. I still cannot find the will to wean myself off the full ankle protection afforded by heavy, high-cut, water-proof trekking boots.

There are also what you'd call transitional equipment. I have changed from a fleece to a down mid-layer clothing, but it remains an intermediate-weight variety. I use stuff sacks of the traditional kind, though I have halved the number I put in my pack. I still use Tupperware to eat in, though I chose the lightest one, because I find the cover useful for our customary packed lunches. I use simple, light flip-flops now and not truck-tyre heavy variations. I use mineral water bottles, instead of hard plastics, though I would like to get lightweight water bladders sometime.

Then there are items in which I went the whole hog light -- principally the single-wall, floor-less, pole-less tarp for a tent, fill-free mummy bag, toothpaste sachets instead of small tubes, and not packing extra batteries for my headlamp. As the load becomes progressively lighter, even more items can be dispensed with. This truism is counter-intuitive, but even then, I am barely there. At 12.167kg total I am merely on the outer borders of plain light.

It may well be that the radical shelter would leak, get blown off by high winds or invaded by running water, leaving me with soaking wet clothes and gear and hypothermia. At least I would have served as a useful guinea pig for the Type IV weather/climate prevailing in that region. And if I come out of this unscathed, why then I would be ready to take the next step, which is to bring the total pack weight below 10kg and finally call myself a true ultralighter. If we were to repeat my club's epic 1998 Aguinaldo Trail climb from eastern Pangasinan to Palanan, Isabela, this would be the proper way to do it.

LESS IS MORE: GEAR MAKEOVER

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 05:09:35 GMT

In the end it was an easy decision to make. The self-inflating mattress and the compact sleeping bag are wonderful pieces of outdoors equipment, but after a remorseless assessment on whether they deserved a place in my backpack I concluded that while I still wanted to keep them, I no longer needed them.

And so the Therm-a-Rest Prolite Plus and the Deuter Dreamlite (zipper opens left) will go to the auction block, destined for climb colleagues who, it is hoped, will put them to more productive use. I can actually count by the fingers of one hand the number of times I had used either on a mountaintop, even during the time that I was hauling a huge pack fit for multi-day climb sorties.

As I make the deliberate switch to lighter equipment, the two items' combined weight of 1.35 kilogrammes in their stuff sacks can no longer justify their place in my current day pack, which already weighs about as much. In their place I have been using a synthetic down-free, locally made mummy bag that weighs just over 400g in its stuff sack, plus a 50g emergency blanket to deal with a wet tent floor. Even a 190g car windshield visor that I had been using in the Therm-a-Rest's place has been ditched. It has been proven that I can sleep soundly without any padding between my back and mother earth.

In fact, I am getting my mind conditioned to being without a tent floor and an insurance second canopy for a switch to a floor-free, single-wall shaped tarp shelter. To this end I am applying a new silicone solution coating to the tarp, which had worryingly leaked the first time I used it outdoors. Including a groundsheet the full shelter plus sleeping equipment weight should add up to under 1.5 kilos. I will keep the other tents for now though, in case it does not work out.

BEDDING DOWN WITH THE TRAILSTAR

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 15:34:38 GMT

Sometime after midnight, the wind picked up to squall proportions. It had been raining all night, but the unwieldy brown monstrosity that is my newest tent had until then held the fort, protecting my entire camera gear underneath a thin single sheet of silicone-impregnated nylon at the end of the AMCI orienteering activity at the Subic harbour.

I bought the Mountain Laurel Designs TrailStar -- the five-sided tarp weighs less than 500 grammes excluding guylines and stakes -- in my obsession to cut my full pack load to less than 10 kilos. As I had not seen anything like it at camp sites anywhere in the Philippines I suspect I am the first owner of the thing here. The attractions are obvious: doing away with the poles and the inside canopy, the heaviest parts of a traditional dome tent, and with the back-to-nature lure of just a thin groundsheet between you and the ground, or, in this case, fine sand.

The mini storm uprooted two of the 10 stakes, a mix of 6.5-inch MSR groundhogs and Big Agnes V stakes, toppled the thin pole that held up its opening, and pushed the main trekking pole in the middle into a leaning tower of Pisa configuration that required improvised emergency re-pegging and tightening of the guylines from under the shelter.

That part I did not mind, as it stood on loose sand and I had not bothered to reinforce the centre pole. Emergency situations however mean you don't get to wear and turn on your head lamp to see what the hell is happening. Instincts take over as you grab and uproot the trek pole and jab the tip back onto the ground in the dark. Well, my first two attempts pierced the ground sheet, but the pole was restored at the third try. The lone casualty is a cheap Chinese tarp that can be easily replaced.

What I had not bargained for was that the shelter leaked! I had seam-sealed it with a silicone gel that had been thinned with turpentine, as the experts have advised, immediately after it was pitched at dusk. The seal looked impeccable when I rinsed it at home later. But there were two spots where the silicone did not work -- one at the stitchings of the Dyneema-reinforced apex where the trekking pole handle rests, and at one of the gear-hanging points about midway up the seams. As it was raining hard outside I did not bother re-sealing the stitches and instead wore my raincoat over my clothes, placed the backpack on top of the camera bag, and went back to sleep. This is unconventional backpacking, folks.

I had gone to Subic to try and hit several birds with one stone -- bird photography of course, pitch, seam-seal and field-test the TrailStar, and get cheap holiday accommodations, in that order. Some of the trainees' conventional tents flooded during the night and they had to move them, so we were in the same boat. I winced when one of them dragged a soiled fly and tent poles to the water's edge and proceeded to wash them. Oli, who has actually more tents than Alman, declared: "I refuse to look."

So is the new shelter worth it? Well, I'll give the seams a fresh coat of silicone when the tent dries up and do it all over again. I'm not sure if I had made a hash of the first coating, or it was just that it did not have enough time to dry before the rain came down. The ideal is to let it stand for one day and not to carry a tube of sealant in your pack. Comfort-wise, it would take a big adjustment to leave the reassuring certainty of the stand-alone dome canopy and bathtub floor. I will probably use it for climbs with large, partly sheltered camp sites. The tent is huge, and I would not make many friends if I tried to pitch that in, say, the summit of Amuyao, Napulauan or Kitanglad.

KIBUNGAN AND CARRYING CAPACITY

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 15:18:36 GMT

As I stopped to catch my breath beneath the two Benguet pines marking the summit, I assessed the damage to the expensive technical shirt that I had agreed to wear for this climb. My trek pants were soaking wet from the dew, but the red dri-fit tee survived my early morning solo bushwhack with just some fraying at the stylised seams in front. I had elbowed my way through some tall shrubs in panic when I lost the trail that ran crazily close to the precipice.

My club's latest three-day swing through Mount Tagpew and four other nearby mountains of Benguet was a training activity, and we did not see any need to pitch camp at the circuit's highest point, preferring a saddle about 30 minutes-hike away. When I made a last-minute decision the morning after to make a summit push however, It was break-camp time and no-one was interested to join me.

The peak rises to 2,105 metres above sea level, but there are actually vegetable plots below a strip of vestigial forest maybe not more than 300 metres down. The proximity of the cultivated farms drove home, at least to me, the absurdity of the carrying capacity crowd, a small segment in our sport who would begrudge amateurs like us the once-a-year, or more likely once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity, to climb mountains in groups larger than a dozen. It's a long-running discussion I've been having with people I've never actually met, including some who have posted comments anonymously on this site. This crowd claims that, in theory at least, trek shoes cause soil erosion and human passage disturbs the wildlife.

Maybe they live in another country though, since by picking on a convenient scapegoat, they avoid the big elephant in the room. There are five million families -- 25 million people, a quarter of the Philippine population, according to Environment Secretary Ramon Paje -- who have climbed up the mountains before them and then stayed behind to live there. Kibungan, the remote town where the five mountains are located, is 100 percent mountainous, and yet some 18,000 people call it home. The trails taken by occasional tourists are used on a daily basis by the upland residents, who consider the forest as part of their backyard and harvest its resources, a practice recognised in part by law. They drive herds of 300-kilogramme cows through there, in case the 50kg minimalists failed to notice the cattle gates.

On the descent, the trail looked plain and easy to see, and I returned to the camp site with both arms raised in triumph, in time to take up my assigned role as a middle sweeper for the AMCI climb party. Beng the team leader had decreed that the climb staff be clad in blushing scarlet, and she actually went and bought me a shirt when I tried to weasel my way out of the fashion-police situation.

The Kibungan circuit is one of the most visually pleasing walking trips that I had had the pleasure of joining. This was my second for this destination in three years, but the beauty of it is the abundance of trails that one can choose from, taking you through pine and mossy forests, rivers, rice terraces and vegetable plots, and some of the most breathtaking rock formations this side of the central Cordilleras. Past a long suspension footbridge above the Liangkan river in the remote hamlet of Tacadang, near Kibungan's boundary with Ilocos Sur and La Union, the party ascends beside a massive, grey cliff wall. Seen from the village above, it looks as if some giant hand had poured black tar from the mountaintop and let it drip down a canvas. The rampant river below is a succession of waterfalls, sculpting the base rock as it flows down to the Amburayan river.

The thing about these walls is that they are never bare. From up close one would see tiny, near-microscopic flowers in full bloom. They are the ones that catch your attention as you scramble down a scary cliff face without rope or any other climbing aid on the flank of Mount Lamagan. I hope the trainee Lira got a good frame on particularly striking one with three pale pink petals, as my camera battery and card memory were exhausted on the first day in my zeal to document the climb in video. Bring a portable charger next time, was the advice of some of my younger climbing friends, so I went out and bought a 32-gigabyte card for next time. I saw some great frames from Joyce and one other trainee, although like most of us amateurs, other climb participants tend to waste the fantastic opportunity by taking hundreds of pictures of themselves in firing-squad poses.

In a climb full of highlight-reel material, I did not get a frame nor clip on Bulalakaw, a treeless peak sandwiched between Tagpew and 1,875masl Mount Ooten, flat and perfect for taking postcard pictures and offering 360-degree views for the more intrepid tourists who would dare go up that far. I consoled myself watching striated swallows, beautiful birds with red-orange rumps, zipping past to catch insects on the wing. Glossy swiftlets were also in abundance throughout the climb, as were pied bushchats singing on the grass. I saw what looked like a green pigeon in flight on the descent from Tagpew, and it might even have been a lifer for me, but I did not have binoculars to check which variety.

I had stuck to my commitment to use a day pack with a total load of not more than 12 kilogrammes, and was ready to use its cellophane waterproofing as sleeping pad when the tent floor was soaked while I pitched it in the rain at the Lamagan camp site. As the rest of the climb staff had occupied the climb guides' quarters at the waiting shed, Zar lent me his tarp and we both had dry beds and a comfortable sleep. Lamagan's leeches were true to their name, however. A dozen bites later, Bugsy asked me if I would still follow through on my pledge to further reduce my pack weight by switching to a floorless tarp shelter. Well, maybe not on this mountain in the rainy season.

Mountain goatherd and his flock. Photo by Katrina Constantino, AMCI 2k11

Serving with the climb staff was a new experience for me. Unlike with trainees who may only be on their first or second climbs and may struggle to find the trail or lose their wits after getting bit by bloodsucking leeches, here you work with veterans like Alvin, the trail master who knows these parts like the palm of his hand. Everything is like clockwork, and there are no issues to brutally thrash out at the post-climb meeting, of the sort we heard from an excellent one in the jeepney ride back to Baguio with Alman's group. Alvin is the point, sets up the parawing and cooks the rice; Danna lays trail signs and bosses the kitchen; while the three full sweepers, Bernie, Zar and Bugsy clean up after everyone else. That left me to do the idiot-proof stuff like fixing or adding trail signs, fetching water from the spring and flipping sliced eggplant and turkey ham on the frying pan. From my past performance, the camp keeper does not trust me with the kitchen knife, even after I argued quite logically that the shape of the slices won't affect the taste. Nothing doing, the mushroom bits that did not make the cut went into the goulash soup.

I don't think I have the patience nor the inclination to serve at the rear, which involves, for a start, carrying double the water and food loads of a normal climber to feed, assist or rescue injured or weaker members of the team. To sweep is to serve, the AMCI sweeper team's motto, puts Henry Sy's into the shade, but my old 32-litre Deuter and 26-inch wide tent floor would have been the wrong equipment. On the other hand, I don't think I can climb fast enough to stay with the team's spearhead. So I think mid-sweep was the perfect spot for me. That way I got to know many of the trainees and the newer members. I saw some seriously strong climbers in this training batch, not the least Thet, who set a relentless pace for me at the final ascent and who reminded me of our triathlete member Mercy Go. I also met Nadine from the European Chamber, who would be a candidate to become the first ever German member of AMCI I think. I made the day pack useful by volunteering to carry the heaviest compact group loads, like stove, fuel and tinned food and by generally making do with less -- or without -- items considered as AMCI must-haves. My camp clothes produced more genuine entertainment than any skit the trainees could dream up at the camp socials. But I was pleased with the interest shown by a number of club trainees and members alike, like Jojo, Dong and Oliver, on how to go about going ultralight. Try using a tent stake to dig catholes. Maybe we have the beginnings of a gear revolution at full-service AMCI, and it would be a revolution indeed. For this trip alone,the climb staff brought four stoves for six people, even though Beng and assistant team leader Jason elected to stay with separate trainee groups.

I made a poor job of it though. On the first day I spent most of the climb properly with Jay's and Red's groups, third and fourth in the order. But the rest of the way I ended up racing the groups near the front to complete the day's hike with Ging's group out in front.

MARIVELES AT 23 LUMENS

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 15:31:50 GMT

With blasts from a bulb horn for company, we sent the club apprentices one by one down the void of a steep mountainside. Lengths of rope coiled and slithered around tree trunks down the dim half-light of the cliff, but since there were no harnesses our basic mountaineering course participants essentially put their lives in their own hands. They descended at intervals of five metres, alert for falling rocks dislodged by climbers following them -- all with the potential for crushing skulls. The reward for a successful descent was a shower beneath the curtain of a waterfall below.

The noisemaker is part of the idiosyncratic climbing gear of Bossing, securities analyst Loven on weekdays, who carries one of the most humongous backpacks in AMCI. Club lore also has it that our former president, who sleeps alone in a three-person tent, can bring rain onto any Philippine mountain just by being part of any climb.

Hair-raising descents stood out for me during my latest visit to the Mariveles mountain range, the giant sentry at the mouth of Manila Bay. The range has a number of headline peaks -- Bataan, Vintana, Pantingan, but I have never reached the top of any of them. Instead, each of my four trips had been unique explorations of the thickly forested ridges that run down to within a few kilometres of the bay mouth. Tarak Ridge is the most well-known, but that part is just a tiny segment of the much longer AMCI trail. When we reached Tarak we did not even stop to drink in the atmosphere. Instead we hiked on up through the small bonsai forest of the subsidiary peak for a repeat of the training descents, this time down the howling white emptiness of the Japanese Garden, a desolate mountain face featuring bleached rocks and leafless trees regularly whipped by fog-laden, gale-force winds. This is only the second training climb of the current batch of apprentices at AMCI, but is probably the most important one they will ever make, since they will sink or swim by how well they handle its technical nature. It's a wimp-killer of a trail, and those who finish it usually go on to become proud members of the club.

The two-day trek starts before dawn from the highway to a community-based forest management project in Alas-asin, where an old swidden farm had been replanted with eucalyptus. We leave the old trail there and take a parallel one to the right that ends in the hut of a slash-and-burn farmer. Then it's up a steep-sided, brush- and cogongrass-covered hillside to rejoin the old trail just below the forest line, better known to non-herders as the cattle gate. By the time the tailend of our climb column reached Papaya River it was midday, though first-time visitors are wont to splash into the whitewater pools first before tucking into lunch.

Instead of turning left toward Tarak Ridge we crossed the river to climb the opposite ridge, pitching camp in early afternoon.

With few other groups using these other trails, our exploration team has taken to arbitrarily naming their main features after themselves, their mothers, and perhaps their dogs, in ways that may sound presumptuous to non-members. Thus the camp site ridge is SkySam, the descent into Papaya is called Nat's Landing, the Papaya waterfall is called SCAJ, and so on.

For this expedition I was assigned at the rear of one of the seven small teams, so I was unable to trek at normal pace. The trainee Oliver and I alternated shepherding Michael, who had only been on a mountaintop once before, this being last month. The reward was gaining time to take pictures as well as raw video, and to really appreciate the beauty of nature.

The sound of onrushing water drowns out everything else at the narrow valley bottoms, while on the ridge tops you only hear the rustle of leaves, your footfalls, and occasionally a dead tree crashing to the ground. Rain alternated with bursts of sunshine to create a colourful light display of dead leaves and twigs, dappled tree trunks and moss-backed rocks, and the occasional tree frog and mushrooms. Although homesteading is rapidly stripping the forests off the more accessible flanks, Mariveles remains the home of giants. I lingered around a gum tree, with thin lengths of twisted bark peeling off from its massive trunk.

The second day was an 18-hour slog. We descended abruptly to the headwaters of the Papaya and linked up with the Tarak trail where we met two couples doing the traditional route. From the ridge we pushed on to the tiny sliver of montane forest before going down to the other side to trek down the more powerful Paniquian River, another potentially life-threatening segment that took about an hour to complete and ended at nightfall. In the dark it took us another five hours to double back to the highway.

But who's complaining? The climb staff, responsible for laying out the itinerary, hit the shower stalls at 10pm. Our BMC recruits come in all shapes and sizes, and their bodies would cry out in surrender after running four rounds of an Olympic track oval. But the human body is truly remarkable. Deep into the four-month course their strengh and endurance dramatically improve. Muscles eventually get tired, but after that, the miraculous thing is that they go on autopilot, mind over matter, willing themselves to perform beyond exhaustion.

The long night trek proved to me that a relatively cheap Petzl Tikkina2 head torch adequately does the job at its full mode of 23 lumens. I lent my Tikka2, which has nearly double the illumination, to Jay, who spent a second night out there with our batchmate TJ and two other members at the rear of the climb column while bringing an injured female climber safely down the mountain. My own 2006 training batch is carving a name for itself as specialist sweepers.

Last weekend's sortie was a watershed for the club. For the first time ever I believe, we assigned women to lead the teams on a major technical climb. Tina, Tessa, Lyka, and my own team leader Danna proved that they can hold their own alongside the men.

A DEATH AT THE FARM

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 06:59:13 GMT

The signal marker of a family"s loss up north is the wood fire outside. One can be forgiven for not having the money to buy candles, food, flowers and black cloth, but neglecting the fire or allowing it to flame out borders on sacrilege in these parts. It was our family's turn to build one, as the last of the corn ripened.

My father had always been good at mechanical things. He loved taking machines apart and revelled in putting them back together again. Part of our responsibilities growing up as boys in his household was to be always on hand to fetch the wrench, the pliers, the steel saw, the mallet, and the sandpaper -- all things that are required in the effort of making a machine function properly. When he was younger he drove lorries -- semis, container trucks, flatbed trucks, or whatever else you called them, and also buses and other big and complicated things. It was ironic that his life would be snuffed out by a mere tractor. I say "mere" tractor to put things in perspective. When I saw the culprit in his barn later on, a strip of his torn dungarees was still embedded along with pieces of dried clod and weeds at the base of the mechanical tiller's spinning claws -- large, scythe-shaped metal blades that turn fallow earth into life-giving soil.

Few people can list growing things for a hobby. Mine are mountain-climbing and bird-watching and some very amateurish photography. But my old man was one of those few. He went into farming on the day he retired. It was an exceptionally challenging activity in a particularly dry part of the country that is better known for its sand dunes and wind farms. In some bad years not enough rain comes. So many other neighbours had simply given up, taken up other pursuits, or simply left. Most years in the past 14, I suspect, he farmed at a loss or at best, barely broke even. It was as if he took perverse pleasure in getting things to grow, against all odds. If you bought all your food from the grocer's or the fast-food take-out counter his is an alien world.

We found a bamboo cross with his old straw hat stuck on top when I took his granddaughter and his dogs to the place where it happened. The earth was neatly raked on all four sides of the dry plot, There were two shallow depressions and dark stains, apparently of motor oil, on the paddy below it. Two of the Labradors trampled on the tiny green rice seedlings that were growing on a nearby plot, waiting for the paddies to be flooded with rainwater for transplanting. That surely would have earned them a tongue-lashing, had their master been alive still. We brought him a bowl of steamed sticky rice and a bottle of rum on an improvised bamboo basket, then had to run, chased home by a sudden thunderstorm. Normally, it would have been an auspicious sign, the start of the wet season for growing things.

THUNDER MOUNTAIN

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 09:33:03 GMT

It was a light and sound show to remember, but to see the outdoor spectacle in relative safety we had to duck inside first.

Thunder and lightning are everyday facts of life for the Zambal Aetas around Pointed Peak, said a woman we met at the Basilio River. "Eight people were struck dead downstream just last month," said the woman, who was using a flat club to try and intimidate a thick and soiled blanket to wash itself on the water. As far as she was concerned, the mountain is called Balingkilat (BPS: Crooked Lightning), the god of thunderstorms. I flinched at the club's choice of camp site on the high saddle between its two main peaks. A few paces behind us (picture) was a steep, scary drop of several hundred metres that was obscured by fog. I later rescued somebody's emergency blanket that had flown off on to the edge before getting snagged on a rock overhang. We'd be sitting ducks here, I thought. And so it proved. Group leader Peachy's and assistant Fabian's gourmet chef lessons were cut short as fat drops of rain pelted the camp kitchen at nightfall, driving everyone inside their tents. I switched off my headlamp and lay still on the floor for a proper viewing: huge yellow bursts of light, followed by warm air pushing down the tent canopy, then massive explosions. It would not have been unlike an incoming artillery or mortar round. I made sure I stayed clear of the MSR Hubba's aluminium hubbed pole. Apart from the liquid food ingredients, the standout casualty was a Coleman beach tent, soaked inside out. The fat, ugly, garish, caveman-chic but bomb-proof baby frogs called Apexus worked best. After the show, out came the abomination called spam, but the fried Taal lake fish actually tasted good under the circumstances.

The first thing that strikes you about this 1,071masl mountain is the sparsity of trees. It was like a vertical desert. The flood plains between the mountain and Basilio Hill are expansive, but nothing grows except scrub, tall grass, rock and fine sand. There were a few half-hearted attempts at human settlement, but they all failed. The first shade of any note was a bamboo grove about two hours uphill that harboured a spring.

Nearly half the team who joined the climb were trainees, and one of them turned an ankle as soon as we crossed the river, about 15 minutes from the trail head. Daddy Mon was hit with killer cramps and had to turn back with his wife, while team sweepers Lester and Bernie had to bivouac at the saddle about a third of the way up to accompany a struggling trainee. But the persistence of this new bunch was quite remarkable. "My first climb," a long-haired guy told me, his attempt at a smile coming out as a wince, after staggering up one of the rock faces that mark the upper section of the trail. I was sat alone on the shade of a bush, taking a brief nap in a desperate search for respite from the heat. These newbies are the lifeblood of our organisation. Without them, the club would be unable to continue. "The people who finish the AMCI Basic Mountaineering Course are not necessarily the fastest nor the strongest ones," I assured Belle and Mitzi as I took up sweeper stations at the rear of the group. "The most persistent ones do." And it is true, it's a war of attrition basically.

The mountain's other remarkable feature is bare rock. You step on them, stub your boot on them or slip off them causing you to fall, and you hug and grasp them as you will yourself up. At the top the exposed bones of the earth form spectacular rock gardens that would put Mount Apo in the shade. I would like to explore and photograph them, with a proper camera on time exposure, should I get a chance to make a return visit.

It is not a particularly difficult climb, unless you have a congenital fear of the heights, for then you are reminded of the nature of it all throughout, in the absence of tree canopy. For me the only difficult part was the heat. The views are awesome, all furrows and ridges of green and thin ribbons of silver streams down to the coasts of Subic Bay to the east and Nagsasa and Talisayin coves on the west and southwest sides.

I felt vindicated going ultralight though. Aris did a double-take on first seeing me on the trail this time: He was more used to my old 75-litre expedition pack, not a 32-litre day pack. Not being a particularly good organiser, I surprised myself by managing to cram a self-contained kit weighing just 12.5 kilogrammes in it, including four litres of trail water. The night was actually balmy even during the storm, and I did not even change out of my trekking pants. The main challenge was guessing the direction of the wind throughout the night so the skinny modified dome is oriented to present its narrow back to the wind while pitched on the sloping grassland. Normally air blows seaward at night, but on which side? It's all water on three sides as far as I could see. In the end I guessed right until dawn, when the wind suddenly shifted to the southeast and threatened to break the tent pole by pushing it on to the ground. I had to get out early and dismantle the tent. Water had pooled underneath a shallow depression beneath the ground sheet soon after thunderstorm started, but the bathtub floor was impregnable. There's one compelling argument against switching to even lighter but floor-less single-wall shelters.

DAY-PACKING A TRAINING CLIMB WEEKEND

Mon, 25 Jun 2012 05:36:13 GMT

Now then, to put theory to practice: I intend to use a 32-litre day pack at my next weekend climb. It's easier said than done, with a lot of legacy equipment still in my trunk and with the rucksack's load limit at just 25 pounds (11.33 kilogrammes).

Although I have climbed a wind-swept neighbouring peak in the storm previously, I know little of this mountain except that it's about a thousand metres tall; that it's bald and is subject to frequent, deliberate and quite pointless burning (see left side, top photo, taken in early 2011); that the trails as a result are exposed, and that unsurprisingly there are no reliable water sources anywhere near the tree-less summit. What it means is ditching equipment to load as much water as you can carry.

I believe it can be done. I have friends who routinely use day packs on multi-day climbs. It's either they too have been bitten by the ultralight bug, or they have awesome compression sacks. Here's how I've stacked it in the top-loader thus far, after chucking out the sleeping bag and extra clothes following consultations with our reconnaissance team (consumables are loaded later, of course). Do I really need extra batteries after putting new ones on the head lamp? No. Do we really need emergency food? No. Does one really need a sport towel? Oh, shut up and just put your clothes on.

Pack
1.36   day pack
0.2     pack liner
-------
1.56

Sleep System
0.25   ground sheet
1.53 solo tent
0.14   pad
-------
1.92

Clothes
0.55   shell jacket
0.54 socks/going home clothes
0.19   slippers
0.19   raincoat
-------
1.47

Base Pack Weight: 4.95kg

Consumables
4.28    water
0.025 toothbrush/paste
0.1      First Aid
0.05    tissue
0.58    fuel
0.098 trail food
0.35    packed meals
------
5.483

Other Essentials
0.97    stove/pots
0.07 mess kit
0.045 trowel
0.1     head lamp
------
1.185

Total Initial Pack Weight: 11.618kg

It's 288g over, but I'm basically there already.

ONCE MORE WITH ULTRALIGHT

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 07:25:45 GMT

Bag. Pack. Tent. This is the unholy trinity that's weighing you down on the trail according to experts. That's apart from the consumables of course, including water and food, not to mention unnecessary items that beg to ride your pack as you go off on a life-changing adventure.

One should climb to smell the flowers and drink in and record the sights for posterity-- only a very select few of us get to go to these places and the succeeding generations may not even have the same opportunity. If there is an impediment to doing these on the trail, they should be cast off and left at home. Each item may just be a hundred grammes, but they swiftly add up. In my case if I don't practice self-discipline the total base pack weight plus consumables easily rise to 17 kilogrammes or more on multi-day climbs, especially if you have to carry all your water with you from the trail head.

Go buy a cheap tabletop weighing scale for yourself and become a gramme-counter like me. Let me try to deconstruct them in Philippine conditions:

BAG (and other sleeping gear). Climbing in the tropics gives us an advantage in that the sleeping bag becomes an option, rather than a necessity. I make do with the lightest model that is locally available -- an unlined bag, an oversized stuff sack, literally, that weighs no more than 400 grammes. Even then, my rule of the thumb is to leave the bag home unless we're pitching camp above 2,000 metres. Of course, if you have a sleeping bag, do you really need a wraparound Muslim skirt still? Nope.

The other heavy item is the inflatable sleeping pad that comes between you and the tent floor at night. They are glorious contraptions, but are they worth their weight, at 800 grammes or so in their stuff sacks? I've stopped using my Therm-a-Rest on most climbs, swapping it for a 140-gramme car windshield visor. Not much cushioning there, but adequate protection from the cold ground. Because if comfort is what you're after, maybe it's wiser to stay at home.

My rule for innermost clothing is, if I bring a sleeping bag I force myself to wear the tiniest running shorts at the campsite. (If you use a solo tent, like me, you may consider doing away with underwear). I use a running singlet for uppers, keeping my base layers well south of 500 grammes.

My sleeping bag rule applies to mid-layer clothing as well. Below 2,000masl I swap my 600-gramme fleece for long-sleeved dri-fit shirt that weighs 200 grammes, and wear my going-home shirt between that and my rain shell jacket to bed, along with the going-home pants and extra socks. The main thing is avoid exposing your extremities to the cold, since they are designed to be the first areas of your body to be denied blood and oxygen to preserve the heat in your inner core.

PACK. My backpack options are a 75-litre, 2.85-kilogramme expedition pack and a 32-litre day pack, so not much of a choice there. First thing is to do away with the pack cover, which serves no purpose other than cosmetic. The water-proofing is in the plastic bag lining you put inside, not the pack cover. Packs get dirty over the course of the climb. Live with it. That easily saves you at least 100 grammes. In my last climb I left the top bag home and used the body much like a Granite Gear Blaze. It wasn't pretty, but it got the job done and cut the weight by 200 grammes. Next time I will snip off all the extraneous belts, buckles, bungee cords and straps. I keep everything inside the pack anyway -- if I leave my water bottles in the pouches outside I tend to lose them. Next time I will buy a lighter and thus much smaller pack -- a no-frills, single-entry like this one -- possibly the 715-gramme, 55-litre Hyperlite Mountain Gear Porter.

TENT. The big switch to MSR Hubba from a Big Agnes two-person shaved more than a kilogramme off to 1.42, but this still puts me on the heavy side on the new standard of double-wall shelters, Lester's Big Agnes Fly Creek 1 which weighs in at 850 grammes. But even that is too heavy now, because my friends from Laoag, Archie and Agnes Pinzon, have proven that a mesh-canopy, trekking-pole-assisted bathtub-floor Tarptent for 700 grammes is the way to go.

The main attraction of the double-walls I believe is the feeling of security afforded by the bathtub floors, which in theory keep you dry unless the water, or the mud, tops two inches or so. The key to bathtub-floor liberation, I believe, is to find a dry, well-aerated or sheltered camp site. Not always an easy task in Philippine settings, where camp site areas are pre-determined and are, more often than not, boggy and are limited in size. But it's an interesting challenge nonetheless. Next time I climb in the dry, I intend to leave home the canopy and go with just fly and hubbed pole for a sub-kilogramme shelter.

There are other, much lighter options to the piece of tarp, which is heavy at 250 grammes, that I would like to try and which I think would do the job just as well, like the plastic sheets I use to cover my books, or polycryo ones sold by Gossamer Gear at 40 grammes. Also, given the chance I would like to try out a number of single-wall shelters like the Mountain Laurel Designs Duomid, the Z-Pack Hexamid that both go under 500 grammes, the weight of a single trekking pole support excluded, to see how they fare in tropical downpours.

If you can afford it, ditch the stakes provided by the manufacturer and swap them for titanium pegs. That's one way to cut weight, but at a price.

OTHERS. There are many other ways to economise on weight, much of it learnt in six years of continuous backpacking across the Philippines. One often overlooked factor is the container -- a Nalgene wide-mouth litre-bottle and those Lock 'N' Lock mess kits each weigh 200 grammes I think. That's nearly half a litre of water, which is a lot more important. You're better off with mineral water bottles and lighter options. Same thing applies to the big tubes of toothpaste, bug repellents, and sun screens that you brought along. If small, solid items fit in a Zip-loc they go in Zip-locs. A length of rope is more deserving of space in your pack if it ever comes to a life-and-death situation.

For the cook sets, remove the frying pan and the smallest pot, and make do with just one pot cover. Or better yet, make your own pot cover with a lighter piece of tinfoil.

One other conundrum is whether to bring a single-lens-reflex camera. Once you've used one on a climb you hate going back to a point-and-shoot. There is a huge weight difference, mine is the difference between 1.5 kilogrammes and 250 grammes. My solution is, if I can sacrifice other items without compromising safety, the SLR climbs with me. But there are now high-quality point-and-shoots with features approaching those of SLRs, like the Canon G12, so maybe that is the way to go.

Lastly the things I wear. I've gotten used to bringing disposable raincoats -- they weigh almost nothing, and most of the time they don't ever get out of the pack anyway, but there were times in past wet climbs when I wished I had my 400-gramme army-regulation poncho with me. It's the same with slippers. I used to carry 400-gramme mojos but noticed that I ended up using them only at camp sites and for going home, so I switched to 190-gramme slippers instead. If the trek shoes reach their end-point anywhere within the trail I could always walk barefoot, like both my grandfathers did.

For trekking clothes, I used to carry an extra shirt, but no longer. I wear a single set for the duration of the climb, using compression shorts for underwear (women wear sport bras as well) to prevent chafing, a common problem for endurance athletes. I wash them at every opportunity and put them back on immediately -- they dry amazingly fast on you. Just about my only vanity item is a single sachet of shampoo that goes with my going-home clothes.

THE AMUYAO ESCALATORS

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 15:58:57 GMT

They call the last stretch the "Escalator", the near-vertical wall of wooden steps that marks the uppermost 577 metres of Amuyao, the father of all mountains of the terraces-building peoples of the north. It is what makes this mountain stand out -- in the same way that Apo is defined by its half-kilometre-long boulder field. It was as if both were created by intelligent design to crush and grind the unwary or foolhardy visitor -- a firewall of sorts, in modern geek speech, to screen out those not worthy of setting foot on its beautiful summit.

The first time I'd visited the village of Batad, with the amphitheatre-shaped rice terraces on its southeast side, way back in 1990, I was green with envy at European backpackers who were on their way up the mountain. In the long years that followed I had always thought my own turn would never come, that I was already too old for it.

In the end I barely made it past, and had to crawl, scream and beg for help over the last stretch, some four hours after my friends and I set out from the town of Barlig to the west. My quadriceps and hamstrings have always been suspect at the start of multi-day climbs -- even when I was training for marathons all year round -- and this time was no different. The thigh muscles gave up early on me for the day (Our team leader Bitoy has a ribald if ironic Tagalog term for the condition).

The rewards for getting past the vertical meat-grinder are obvious, if you ignore the ugly ABS-CBN relay station that occupies most of the top of the main peak. You get a 360-degree view of the Cordilleras. On clear days when the fog is not rolling across the mountaintops, one can see Pulag, Calauitan, plus Batad. The start of the descent, toward the remote village of Pati-ay, more than a thousand metres down, is the most visually-rewarding segment of the traverse route to Batad, which covers about 17 kilometres across the mountain ranges. One is lost in the primeval world of the wet, mossy forest, where to the warble of white-browed shamas and other birds unknown and the soft tinkle of flowing water, tiny plants grow on gnarled tree trunks and branches as well as on the dimly-lit ground, sipping all their life-giving sustenance on the moist air.

Once you are about 300 metres down however, the trail becomes more brutal, making the descent arguably even more difficult than the ascent. It is like a mad man's escalator in reverse -- with the steps removed. The steep downhills appear on their face to be the most intimidating, but the rolling sideskirts are actually the most treacherous. To discover that I still have the upper body strength to do reasonably well in both segments is a liberating feeling. After Pati-ay, where one can dawdle by courtyards paved with large flat stones for a night or more, simply admiring the 5,000-years-old marvels of Ifugao engineering, the long march to Batad feels like a different climb altogether. Each village nestles a narrow valley, so to hop from one hamlet to the next means climbing at least a mountain each way. On the third day it was nearly dark when we got to Cambulo, on a crook of the river of the same name. Some stretches leave you walking trails not much wider than a foot, a bare cliff face to one side and a sheer drop of more than 100 metres down the other. When we got to the view deck atop Batad there was only time left for a few squeezes of the shutter before we had to whip out headlamps for the last hop of the terrace walls to Simon's Inn. The trail had everything a masochist could ask for -- down to stinging nettles, blood-sucking leeches, river treks, and crawling down the face of a small waterfall. I even got stung by a bee. You have to admire the lung- and leg power of residents of these parts, especially the old ones, who can cover the entire stretch in less than a day.

My club is a big organisation, with at least a thousand members, but I like this small group which I most often climb with. Their day jobs I know little about, but they tend to climb the most often, and do so out of pure love for the mountains and the natural world. They are an extremely competitive, opinionated bunch, but they share an aversion to other pursuits that have no connection with the heights, such as swimming or cycling or wearing silly, loud spandex suits.

It being a busy Independence Day weekend, we had to share the bus, the trail and even camp kitchens with another group, called U-Trek. As they got to the summit first, we had to make do with the bunkhouse. Even at Pati-ay, the temptation was great to just take up the locals on their offer to rent out their homes for the night. I had no interest in staying indoors for a second consecutive night however, so once the locals assured me there would be no church services the following morning, I pitched my solo tent at the chapel courtyard, within inches of the top edge of a high terrace wall. I made sure the side door faced the other side, but if your needle stakes are not driven in properly, you could easily roll off to your death regardless inside the canopy during the night. Lester pitched his brand-new, sub-kilo Big Agnes Fly Creek on the other side of the yard, but Che's unused TNF Mica solo was a three-day passenger inside her pack. Even though my friends still laugh at me for my counter-intuitive habit of wearing running shorts and singlets at near-freezing camp sites, there is a belated trend toward the ultra-light movement in my club, a point I tried to pitch to Rica as we swapped packs on the climb up to the pick-up point on our way back to Banaue.

The winged termites came out of their burrows beneath the earth the night we arrived at Batad, always a happy event for me since childhood. In my folks' place their once-yearly appearance ushers in the wet season, though amazingly we had a dry climb, even with the AMCI rainmaker himself, Bossing, in our team. Green beetles, cicadas, moths, praying mantises, and other types of night crawlers and fliers were out in force as well. My pack, which I had thought was indestructible, finally tore, but the bottom-line is that I had an event-free climb, coming just two months after my near-death experience with a suspected grand mal. Just wait till my neuro hears about this.

PERHAPS THE LAST OF THE FRUGIVORES

Sun, 27 May 2012 09:48:57 GMT

When we first met Jessie I had this notion he must be among the Wild Bird Club of the Philippines' founders. You have to be a certified crazy bird nut to volunteer to drive on team leader Ruth's terms: meet up at an out-of-the-way petrol depot at 0315 and take your human cargo up the Magnetic Hill near the Cavite-Batangas boundary in the dark in less than two hours. The itinerary was precise and had a ring of certainty to it, in a military sort of way. Sunrise at 0526, it said. When we had finished and were having our coffee at the DENR park ranger's station the weekend's first climb groups, who know this place as Pico de Loro, were only just arriving.

When we sat down for the bird count, however, he asked what the term lifer meant. At least our tribe is increasing. Through short but heavy downpours we had our fill of forest birds -- from the common like the coppersmith barbet, Philippine bulbul and stripe-headed rhabdornis, through the more desirable and colourful bald mynas, full-size woodpeckers, tarictic hornbills, fairy bluebirds and drongos, to exotic owls and shamas and whatever else Rob had managed to scare up for his visiting guests beneath the tropical lowland rainforest canopy. I was too busy getting re-acquainted with my camera -- which drowned at Olango last month and needed a major makeover -- to notice. The narrow valley where the DPWH chose to tunnel through the mountainside to build a road linking Maragondon, Ternate and Caylabne on the Cavite side to Nasugbu on the Batangas side remains one of the richest birding sites near Manila. The forest creeps to within metres of the winding mountain roads, just like at Subic, which brings the birds within reach of the cheapest, shortest telephoto lenses available. The secret, it appears, is to start birding at daybreak. In the blinding heat at 10am even the perched Philippine falconets, the signature species of the Palay-Palay range, to my mind, are scarce.

My life list itself was up by three to 189: the striped flowerpecker, the greater flameback, and the white-bellied woodpecker. But I came away from the trip feeling disturbed. There were a lot of things that did not make sense. Is this not supposed to be a national park, Ternel wondered out loud. Why were entire stretches of the mountainsides fenced off with concertina wire and studded with "Private Property: No Trespassing" signs? Why is there a house and a baying dog on top of that ridge, Anna asked. And why are they felling trees? A two-hectare patch of forest was recently burnt, she estimated. I myself wondered about a tricycle driving down the mountain road filled with logs chopped down into short pieces. And what was that boy doing, driving a herd of goats up the road? Last time I heard, goats ate grass, not trees. The implication is that whoever is burning the mountain has cleared a large enough patch of forest into open meadows to sustain a huge pack of ruminants. It is really worrying because underpinning this wonderful bird habitat are the fruiting trees. Many of the largest, most colourful species eat nothing but fruit, and there are only a finite number of fruiting trees to visit and share. And they don't grow and bear fruit overnight.

What is the DENR doing about it? How about the Philippine Marines who are supposed to be the guardians of the last patch of Cavite's forest? (And why does the tripod seem to fall on its own? Why won't the birds sit still long enough for a family portrait?) Lots of questions. And the thing is, I am a pessimist by necessity, rather than by nature. I have a suspicion the answers will only make me feel depressed.