Online registry opened to Makiling hikers

SAN PEDRO CITY—Wanting to speed up the queues of hikers spending the Lenten break on Mt. Makiling, the Makiling Center for Mountain Ecosystems (MCME) has launched an online registration to prebook thousands of visitors expected this week.

The online registration is the newest feature of Make it Makiling (MIM), the visitor management program of the University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB), to encourage responsible hiking and, at the same time, promote forest conservation. Launched in 2002, MIM is activated during Lent, when large groups of trekkers visit Makiling.

“We’ve noticed in the past years that there had always been a bottleneck at the entrance,” Leo Baruga, MIM overall coordinator, said in a telephone interview last week.

He said to ease the filling out of forms and attending the required briefing, “which usually takes 10-15 minutes [per group],” visitors may now do these online through MIM’s website (http://mim.mountmakiling.org/).

Baruga said visitors reach an average of 10,000, with numbers peaking on Good Friday, each year.

Last year, only about 3,600 hikers were accommodated after the town government of Los Baños issued an advisory for an incoming typhoon, prompting forest managers to close the trail midweek.

MCME, through the MIM website, offers maps of the two hiking trails—the Mariang Makiling trail starting from the UPLB campus in Laguna province and the West Mariang Makiling trail from the Sto. Tomas Ecopark in nearby Batangas province.

It also shows a slide presentation of “Leave No Trace,” a popular hiking guideline on outdoor ethics.

Aside from the online registration, visitors may take an online quiz, too, and skip the actual briefing on site, Baruga said.

Mt. Makiling is the 33rd Asean Heritage Park, a recognition by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations for its exceptional biodiversity. The forest reserve is also host to 2,038 species of flowering plants, most of them endemic to the Philippines.