At 2,586 m - a 2022 resurvey suggests 2,616 m, though no
official survey has confirmed it - Mount Halcon is the highest point on Mindoro and the
23rd-highest peak in the Philippines, rising from the interior of Baco, Oriental
Mindoro. Its slopes are the ancestral domain of the Alangan Mangyan, and the
mountain is climbed only with their guides and rites. The first documented ascent was made
in 1906 by the American botanist Elmer Drew Merrill with a party of
forestry and military men; for long stretches since, the peak has been closed to outsiders
entirely.
Halcon has a fearsome name among Filipino climbers - widely held to be the country's
most difficult and technical ascent. The route from Lantuyan wades the
Dulangan River dozens of times, climbs relentlessly through mossy cloud
forest hung with leeches and near-constant rain, then commits to the exposed
Knife Edge - a narrow rocky ridge with a wooden-ladder crux - for the final push
to the summit. Stunted trees cling to ultramafic rock near the top, and waterfalls pour
off the peaks that ring the Aplaya camp below.
The cloud-wreathed massif is a stronghold of endemic life: the critically endangered
Mindoro bleeding-heart dove survives in its forests, and the strange stick insect
Conlephasma enigma was first described here in 2012. The mountain is Oriental
Mindoro's great watershed, and its summit spends much of the year buried in cloud - press
the button below to raise the sea of clouds and let the ridge float above it. Terrain is
real NASA SRTM elevation draped with Esri World Imagery; the summit region is refined with
a denser mesh and z15 imagery. The cloud deck is stylised.