Beauty in the Dirt of Bansalan Trail
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Let’s not talk about the glory of Mount Apo, of its dizzying list of vertical quantifications and prominence, or our day-to-day itinerary to the summit. It’s already been told and made a hundred times. “Apo Sandawa” needs no further flattery.
Let’s speak about the hike instead, the painstaking journey into its majesty, the experience, the dirt and beauty alike surrounding one of the many hiking trails to the Grandfather of Philippine Mountains, Bansalan Trail.


The typical hiker, especially if it’s their first time, would prefer taking the more popular trail to Mount Apo through Lake Venado and the Boulders because that’s what we mostly see on social media. Most especially the Boulders—it just feeds the visual laboriousness of it all and serves as proof that you survived the highest mountain in the country. Our organizer sent us the itinerary a week before our flight. It did not have Lake Venado. No definite chance at the Boulders either.

Bansalan Trail is rated as one of the easier trails. Not for us, but boy was it a scenic route. That morning was pretty brisk with isolated drizzles, so the climb at the start required me a parka and my full attention to the fogs furling through the greens. Following some long terraces of farmland was the first mossy forest. Our long day had just begun but it already made ours.


Mount Apo Natural Park was declared a protected area and a component of the Natural Protected Areas System in 2003 as it is now home to over 600 floral species, including over 100 families of ferns and over 20 families of mosses. All these things enveloped that day in the moody Midas touch of fogs for our eyes, and mud and stone for our feet.

It surely added to the cinematic spectacle. Beauty in dark shades of brown and green from all corners and sides and for all senses, from the cooling shades of the foliage overhead down to the musical snaps of branches and twigs under my soles.
I wished the jungles wouldn’t end for they made this hike literally a walk in the park. All in my mind was to take pictures of the interesting ones my green-thumbed mother would surely love.
From small ferns on the ground to massive ones like fans for the giants, mysterious mosses, flocking things that could trigger trypophobia, air plants that gave plain trees a personality, lush undergrowths, leaves with shapes I saw for the first time, sporadic blossoms popping up with their bold and bright colors above the greens and the fog, and sky-scraping, century-old-looking trees.
There was one tree species that had my neck breaking from looking to the sky in wonder. From below, the serpentine branches resembled neurons slithering with the same neighboring tree. It had white flowers swaying in the wind like willow catkins or cobwebs. I had to ask our guide what these trees were. “They are tinikaran,” he said. “And those white parts are the leaves.”
Second day was summit day. All in the team had a shared dream of greeting the sunrise from the country’s highest tip, so we began very early in the morning when the trails were nothing but black and dirt in the rough within the circumference of light from my headlamp.
If this was still part of Bansalan Trail, those who claim this is the easier route are either lying or understating. The hike to the summit was everything that you expect and understand from “the highest mountain”. It was all-around demanding to the body, a survival test of endurance, resilience, and adaptation to the dropping temperature.
When I caught sight of the sign that we finally reached Kidapawan Peak, my tears couldn’t help but fall down, they might have iced up in the cold. Our dream sunrise session from the summit of Mt. Apo remained a dream, but we just woke up from another dream—all hikers’ dream—to finish Mt. Apo.
Thinking about the way back could already be draining, as the two summits from my pre-Apo hikes. But the anticipation of walking through Bansalan Trail’s plant life once again and seeing the tinikaran trees tasted better than whatever I took out of a can that morning for breakfast.
Sun was out that day. It gave the trail a second character, a less mysterious one, and a brighter look at another layer of its beauty the fogs once hid. Brighter shades of green, darker shades of brown, firmer ground to tread, and livelier birdsongs. I might not feel all of this if we pushed for the more popular trail. We might not be missing out after all.


Bansalan Trail got me rethinking about my past hikes, how summits can be overrated, and the trails need to be appreciated and be told stories about just as much. Summits could look alike; it’s the trail that makes each hike exceptional. It’s not always about reaching the peak but the journey, all beauty and dirt alike, to it. ❜

Photos and words by SANKA TEAM