[I haven’t written in a while, but I’ve been seeing a lot of mountain photos on my feed, and I hope this can serve as a reminder to leave no trace.)
About a month ago, a group of friends and I climbed Mt. Maculate in Cuenca, Batangas, a very easy dayhike with a spectacular view of the Laguna de bay at the summit.
Anyway, because of the fact that it’s one of the most accessible mountains from Manila, it’s become highly popular among mountaineers, veteran or otherwise. However, by extension, it’s also (and unfortunately) one with the most raped trails — wantonly spoiled in fact, compared to other mountains; so spoiled that they had to open a new trail to accommodate the climbers because the old trail was already too wide, and, in a lot of places, too dirty.
It’s unfortunate.
While it’s a rule in climbing that every climb should be a clean-up climb (it can, of course, be many other kinds — exploratory, minor, major, what have you), sometimes people forget. Sometimes we go up mountains as a sort of a ritual — a kind of cleansing, and then we go down, completely unmindful of our impact on the mountain. Forgetting altogether that the least we could have done for the mountain was to make it a little less dirty than when we found it so that other people could experience the same kind of cleansing we went through.
Sometimes we forget. Sometimes we choose to.
And always that’s unfortunate. Because always always should we try to remember.
The typhoon season’s over and it’s climbing season once more, and I’m but a faint whisper in the utter chaos that is everyday life, but let this faint whisper leave you with this:
Let’s try and be nicer to the mountains. Doing so tells us much more about ourselves than it does the mountain. Doing so helps us much more than it does the mountain.
And in a grander scheme of things, that’s the best kind of cleansing there is.
Of perpetual finds 