Mount Banoy

Mount Banoy straddles the boundary between Lobo and Batangas City and is by far the most climbed peak in the range, recording 10,170 ascents between 1999 and 2015 out of a total of 10,746 across all three Lobo mountains. It is bordered by the barangays of Calo, Balatbat, Masaguitsit and Banalo, with the usual jump-off at Sitio Hulo in Banalo.

Almost every hiker who has climbed in Lobo has climbed Banoy. The mountain accounts for nine out of every ten recorded ascents in the municipality, and the great majority of those arrived through the Tibig–Dilawan range on the Batangas City side, though in practice the accessible trail begins at Sitio Hulo in Barangay Banalo on the Lobo side. A second entry runs through Sitio Malabnig in Balatbat.

The stone marker

Banoy also carries the town's founding story. In September 1991, thirteen Loboanos climbed it in search of the mohon, the stone marker that had defined the boundary between Lobo and the city of Batangas since the Spanish period. They found it an hour or two above Sitio Malabnig, and it still marks the line today. The men are named in the local history published by S.P. Macatangay in 1993: Osmundo Cortas, Flavio Cortas, Cario Driz, Clemente Evangelista, Daniel Cortas, Efren Diona, Eldifonso Cortas, Florencio Dimacuha, Luminado Panaligan, Hilasio Ramirez, Rodolfo Umali and Igmedio Cortas.

The helicopter and the tower

The same day produced a story the town still tells. A helicopter appeared over the ridge, and the rice harvesters of Malabnig hid in the fields, assuming soldiers. The passenger turned out to be an American scouting a site for a telecommunications tower. The tower was built. In February 2002 it was burned down by insurgents, and the university mountaineering group that had been climbing Banoy since 1999 stopped going for a time.

A research mountain

What Banoy became instead was a research mountain. Between 1999 and 2009 it was the subject of a long run of student and faculty work out of the Lobo campus of Batangas State University: forest community structure on the northwestern slope, the endemic Luzon beetle Macrophysis luzona and its relationship with dungon trees, non-timber forest products, native chicken husbandry, goats and fodder crops, swidden agriculture, the wild jungle fowl or labuyo, and the vanishing native rice landraces inuway and kamuros. A mountain once known as a rebel stronghold turned into a farming community that hosts hikers and, in December 2009, an International Mountain Day camp run jointly by the military, police, the water district, the DENR field office and two mountaineering clubs.

Source: Caringal et al. (2017), From logging to blogging, Asia Life Sciences 26(2): 257–282. Climbers register at the village entry points, and an environmental user's fee has applied since March 2014; we do not publish a figure for it until it is checked in person.

Related

Back to the mountains of Lobo, or on to Mount Naguiling and Mount Tilos. Road access is on how to get to Lobo; the arrival record is on mountain arrivals.