DENR: Mt. Banahaw remains off-limits to climbers

LUCENA CITY—The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) in Quezon province on Monday said Mount Banahaw remains off limits to mountaineers, nature trippers and pilgrims who want to scale it this Holy Week.

DENR-Quezon chief Alfredo Palencia issued this warning after Salud Pangan, DENR park superintendent  for Banahaw and the neighboring Mount San Cristobal, discovered Monday that a syndicate was again luring mountaineers and nature trippers by promising them access to the mystical mountain for a fee.

“The mountains are off-limits until 2016,” Palencia said.

Pangan, in a separate interview, said she was alarmed by a message on the Facebook page of one of Banahaw’s supposed  advocate groups.

A message invited mountaineers to join a two-day tree-planting activity on April 7 and 8 in Banahaw.

The message claimed that the activity was allowed by the DENR. The supposed tree-planting activity also included trekking and camping in several mountain spots declared close to the public by the Protected Area Management Board (PAMB).

“No permit was given by the PAMB for that tree-planting activity,” Pangan said.

The PAMB is a multisectoral body tasked by the government to monitor  protected areas.

Pangan said the suspect also initiated a similar tree-planting activity last year in Laguna province.

“His group had really planted trees but we later learned that it was used as a cover [for] the main agenda—to climb and enter the still off-limit spots,” she said.

Last January and February, Pangan said the suspect tried to again secure permits from her office, supposedly for the monitoring and inspection of the planted trees, but she turned down the application.

Pangan declined to identify the suspect so as not to preempt a course of action by the DENR.

The activities of Banahaw con groups was first discovered in 2012 on the Facebook pages of some pseudo-mountaineering groups, she said. Pangan also found out that her signature had been forged by the con groups and was affixed to the fake DENR documents, which they showed to their victims.

The PAMB officially declared Banahaw’s peaks closed to trekkers until February 2016 to protect  gains from its long closure since 2004.

Camping, praying and other religious activities are allowed only in designated areas near the foot of the mountain.

Pangan said Banahaw’s entry points in Dolores and Sariaya towns remain closed. However, trekkers can hike to nonrestricted sections of the mountain via the trails in Tayabas and Lucban towns in Quezon,  and in Liliw, Majayjay and Nagcarlan towns in Laguna.

“But they have to secure the necessary permits from the towns’ respective environment officials,” she stressed.

She said the permits also stipulated that only 20 to 30 mountaineers would be allowed to conduct the hike in a single day in observance of the mountain’s carrying capacity.