Mount Naguiling

Mount Naguiling, officially named Mount Lobo and known locally as Bundok ng Naguiling, is the highest peak in the range at 1,007 metres. It recorded 535 ascents between 1999 and 2015, most through the barangays of Jaybanga and Nagtoctoc. Its narrow, mossy summit carries pitcher plants and rare endemic flora.

Naguiling is the high point of the range and the second most climbed, though a distant second: 535 recorded ascents against Banoy's ten thousand. Mountaineering here began in the last quarter of 2001. Between 2001 and 2007 a Batangas State University research team climbed it repeatedly to photograph and record forest plants, and in 2009 and 2010 biology students from the University of Santo Tomas were permitted by the municipal government to collect Nepenthes pitcher plants from the narrow mossy summit on the Jaybanga side and along the Bangkalan–Nagtoctoc ridge.

The summit zone holds two things worth knowing about. One is Leptospermum flavescens, the myrtaceous shrub known locally as malasulasi or red tea tree, recorded as vulnerable and rare. The other is an epiphytic Nepenthes that grows on its branches — a pitcher plant living in the canopy of a tea tree, near the top of a mountain nobody visits.

Access runs mainly through Jaybanga and Nagtoctoc, with smaller numbers entering from Apar, San Nicolas, Balibago, and the Sombrero peak above Sawang. Bloggers documenting the route have described two approaches, one via Lipa and Rosario, one via Balagtas and Batangas City, and have noted side trips along the way including the rice terraces and the Nagtoctoc road.

Where climbers entered

Source: Caringal et al. (2017), From logging to blogging, Asia Life Sciences 26(2): 257–282. The 1,007-metre figure conflicts with the 905 metres given in general reference sources and the 945-metre-plus figure from the 1977 NAMRIA survey; the discrepancy is recorded on the mountains page rather than resolved.

Related

The mountains of Lobo, Mount Banoy, Mount Tilos, and how to get to Lobo.