Trekking Mt. Arayat

Province of Pampanga

15 October 2011

Early 3:00 AM October 15, 21 hikers met at Mc Donalds El Pueblo and prepared for travel to the province of Pampanga to scale Mt. Arayat. Guiding us were Ace, Joel and Darren.

Trail leading to Mt. Arayat from jump-off point

We left Mc Donalds 4:00AM onboard two private vans. Our destination, Brgy. San Juan Baño, Arayat, Pampanga. We had a stop-over at a gas station along NLEX to buy some supplies and CR break.

We reached the DENR (Ranger Station) office at Brgy. San Juan Baño in Arayat, Pampanga 6:30AM and it was still closed. Our guide Ace had to go back to the Brgy. office to register us, get 2 local guides and settle the DENR fee for our climb.

Approaching the covered trail

We started trekking Mt. Arayat at 7:00AM. This is 1 hour and a half earlier than our IT of 8:30AM.

Mt. Arayat trail in general was nice. The first part was a nice open landscape covered mostly with cogon grass. After about an hour of trekking, we started to trek a more steep part of the mountain and this time, a forest. This part of the trail was quite tiring.

Lush green environment

Our summit assault was quite tiring because the trail going up was long compared to Pico de Loro and Sierra Madre.

At about 10:00AM, we reached the "View Deck". The view of the Pampanga river at this point was very majestic. Looking over it from the top reminded me of the arial view of Amazon River.

Mt. Arayat summit

We continued our summit and finally reached the peak-camp site 15 minutes before 12Noon.

There were about 5 mountaineers who went ahead of us and were preparing for lunch when we arrived at the summit. The summit though was covered with trees so we had to go down a little bit to have a full view of the awesome landscape below us.

Steep trail

From the summit, we saw the long and winding Pampanga river and the green rice fields some of it were still flooded. We were so lucky to be a little early at the summit. After few minutes, the clouds spread and the view was completely covered with fog.

After having few camera shots at the view deck of the summit, we went back to the camp site and had our lunch.

Huge rocks and trees along the trail

After lunch, We rested for a while and then started our descent past 1:00PM. At this time, it started to drizzle.

When we were at the middle of trail, there was a heavy down pour that made the trail slippery and muddy making our descent more challenging. Most of us were wet.

Mt. Arayat summit

Myself, Nel, Bianca and AJ went ahead and reached the jump-off point at 3:00PM. We were quite fast.

We were all back at the jump-off point safe at about 6:30PM. We finally left the DENR office at about 7:00PM and went back home to Manila straight. More photos.

-o0o-