Geography of Besao - Mountains, Rivers, and Highlands Explained

Geography of Besao - Mountains, Rivers, and Highlands Explained

Come, sit here by the fire. Let me tell you about our land, this place we call Besao. You've traveled far to reach us, no? Your legs are probably still shaking from that ride up the mountain road. Don't worry, that's normal. Even we get dizzy sometimes when we look down at where we came from.

You see, Besao sits up here at about 4,600 feet above the sea. That's more than a kilometer and a half straight up into the sky! When you were driving up that winding Besao-Sagada Road, climbing higher and higher into the Cordillera Central, you probably noticed the air getting cooler, fresher. Down there in the lowlands, people are sweating under the sun. Up here, we need our jackets. Sometimes in the early morning, you can see your own breath in the air, like you're a dragon or something. The children find it amusing.

Our municipality covers about 173 square kilometers. To give you an idea, that's quite a big piece of land, though most of it goes straight up and down rather than flat like the pages of a book. The pine trees here smell different from the trees below. Stronger. Cleaner. When the wind blows through them, they whisper stories of our ancestors. Or maybe they're just gossiping about the tourists who can't stop taking pictures. We're never quite sure.

Now, let me tell you something interesting about our land. Besao is not flat like a basketball court where everything is the same height. Oh no. Our different barangays live at very different elevations, and this makes all the difference in the world. Up in Gueday, our highest settlement, people live at about 1,850 meters above the sea. That's almost 6,100 feet! Up there, the weather is even colder than here. The clouds don't just pass by above you, they walk through the village like lost travelers looking for directions. The people of Gueday have something special there, an old Agricultural Stone Calendar left by the ancient Agawa people. How they figured out the seasons and stars and farming times using stones, I tell you, our ancestors were smarter than all these smartphones you carry around.

Then you have Lacmaan sitting at about 1,532 meters, where on a clear day you can see valleys spreading out below you like a green blanket someone forgot to fold properly. Suquib is up there too at 1,583 meters. But if you go down to Tamboan, the lowest of our barangays, you're only at 942 meters. That's almost a thousand meters difference from Gueday! Imagine that. In the same municipality, you can be a thousand meters higher or lower depending on which barangay you visit. This means what grows well in Gueday might not even survive in Tamboan. The temperature is different, the rain patterns are different, even the spirits that live there might have different personalities. Our farmers know this. They know it in their bones. What Mother Earth gives to one place, she might not give to another, even if they're just a few kilometers apart.

Let me tell you about Mount Mogao, our guardian mountain. You can see it from here if you look over there, near the boundary with Tadian. Rising up to about 1,302 meters with its head held proud above the other hills, Mount Mogao is more than just a big pile of rocks and trees. It's covered in what we call batangan or saguday, the managed pine forests that belong to our different clans. Six traditional dap-ay groups take care of their ancestral forest territories there. The Pap-ayangan clan has their section, the Anonang have theirs, and so do the Balaan, Tampogo, Bangbangoan, and Bayongasan families. Each group tends their pine groves the way a mother tends her children, carefully and with great patience, following practices handed down from grandparents who learned from their grandparents who learned from their grandparents. You get the idea.

These aren't wild forests left to grow however they please. No, no. Every tree has been thought about, planned for. The elders know which trees to cut, which to let grow, when to plant new ones. If you hike up there, and I recommend you do if your legs can handle it, you'll walk through these culturally significant pine groves and reach viewpoints where you can see the whole municipality spread below you like a map. The Mount Mogao View Deck has become quite popular with visitors who want to take photographs. Just be careful not to drop your phones. We've had some tourists learn the hard way that gravity works very well up here.

Now, about Mounts Buasao and Sisipitan, let me tell you a story that might embarrass us a little. Back in the 1800s and early 1900s, our ancestors were not always wise about the forests. They cut down most of the pine trees near the villages for firewood, for building, for clearing land. The mountains near our homes became as bald as my uncle's head. But far away on Mounts Buasao and Sisipitan, natural pine forests survived because they were too far, too difficult to reach.

Those distant forests became like a savings account we didn't know we had. When people needed firewood, the elders would organize expeditions to trek all the way to Buasao or Sisipitan. Can you imagine? Walking for days into the mountains, sleeping under the stars, cutting wood and bundling it into loads so heavy you wonder how anyone carried them back. My grandfather told me stories about those journeys. He said by the time you got home, you were so tired that the firewood had to last a long time because no one wanted to make that trip again soon.

Eventually, someone smart said, "Why are we walking so far when we could plant pine trees closer to home?" And that's how the reforestation efforts began. We learned our lesson, you see. Now Mount Mogao and other nearby peaks wear green coats of pine trees again. Buasao and Sisipitan still stand there in the distance, reminding us of what happens when we're not careful. They're like stern grandparents who don't say much but whose presence keeps everyone behaving properly.

There's also Mount Calvary in our landscape. Like many things here in Besao, it's both a physical place and a spiritual one. We Kankanaey people see no separation between the two. A mountain is not just rock and soil and trees. It's a presence. It has personality. It has spirits living in it, watching over us, sometimes testing us. When you look at our mountains, try to see them not just as scenery for your photographs, but as beings with their own lives and stories.

Now let's talk about water, because without water, even the most beautiful mountain is just a dead pile of rocks. We call our rivers and streams "ginawang" in our Kankanaey language. These waterways are the veins and arteries that make life possible up here in the highlands. But Besao's rivers are nothing like those lazy lowland rivers you might be used to, the ones that meander slowly through flat plains like old men taking afternoon walks.

Our rivers are young and energetic, you could say hyperactive, like teenagers who drank too much coffee. They're born from mountain springs fed by the forests above, and they rush down steep slopes, cutting through valleys, carving the dramatic landscape you see around you. During the dry season, they calm down a bit, becoming manageable streams where you can actually cross without risking your life. But when the heavy rains come, and let me tell you, with climate change these days they come more often and heavier than before, these gentle streams transform into angry torrents that can sweep away anything in their path.

Flash flooding is something we live with, not something we just read about in the news. Large volumes of water surge down from the high slopes through every creek, every rivulet, every river channel. The water doesn't ask permission. It just comes, bringing with it mud and rocks and sometimes pieces of people's farms. We've seen slopes collapse, landslides take away rice paddies that families spent generations building and maintaining. The rainfed paddies suffer the most because unlike the irrigated ones that are used to holding water, the dry paddies just can't absorb that much water that quickly. It's like trying to drink from a fire hose. Not recommended.

Here's something important that our ancestors understood long before modern science came along with its fancy words and explanations. The health of our rivers depends entirely on the forests above them. You want to know why we protect our pine forests so jealously? It's not just because we need the wood for building and burning. The forests act as giant sponges, catching the rainfall, releasing it slowly into the springs, regulating the flow of water year round. When someone cuts down forest carelessly, the springs begin to fail. The water output decreases. Then the rice paddies don't get enough water, the drinking water becomes scarce, and everybody suffers.

This is why we have the batangan system of forest management. It's not just about trees. It's about water, about life, about making sure our grandchildren and their grandchildren will still have rivers flowing through these valleys. Everything is connected, you see. The forest feeds the springs, the springs feed the rivers, the rivers feed the rice paddies, the rice paddies feed the people, and the people protect the forests. It's a circle, and if you break any part of it, the whole thing falls apart.

More than half of Besao, about 52% of our total area, is classified as forest reserve. Another quarter or so is timberland, and the rest is forest that nobody has quite decided what to call yet. The bureaucrats in their offices like to give everything labels and categories. But the point is, more than three quarters of our municipality is covered in forest. In a world where forests are disappearing faster than my hair, that's something to be proud of.

These forests aren't all the same, though they might look similar to someone just passing through. We have our pine forests, the pagpag or batangan, mostly at higher elevations where the pine trees thrive in the cool mountain air. Then there are mixed forests where pine trees share space with other species in the transitional zones. And we have watershed forests, the protected groves that we guard most carefully because they feed our river systems. These forests do more work than you might think. They store carbon from the air, they hold the soil in place on these steep slopes, they provide homes for birds and animals, and yes, they give us sustainable timber and firewood. See? Everything connected again.

Only about 10% of Besao's land is actually used for agriculture. Look around at all these mountains and forests and you realize that we're farming on just a tiny fraction of our land. But somehow, this small fraction feeds all 6,873 of us who live here. How? Through the terraces, the payeo. These rice terraces you see carved into the mountainsides like emerald staircases climbing toward the sky, they represent engineering genius.

Our ancestors looked at these impossibly steep slopes and said, "We're going to farm here." Can you imagine? Slopes so steep that lowlanders would consider them good for nothing except maybe goat grazing. But our people carved them into level terraces, each one carefully graded to hold water without spilling over, without eroding. It's hydraulic engineering without engineers, architecture without architects, just generations of observation and trial and error and careful thought. When you look at these terraces, you're looking at the accumulated wisdom of centuries.

Beyond the wet rice terraces, we also have what we call uma or um-a, the swidden farms on converted forest land. We practice rotational farming there, growing sweet potato, corn, legumes, squash, sugarcane, coffee, various fruits. These days, temperate vegetables have become important cash crops too. Sayote, cabbage, carrots, things like that. The lowlanders can't grow them well because it's too hot down there. But up here in our cool climate, they grow beautifully. So we've become vegetable farmers along with everything else. Diversification, the development workers call it. We just call it smart farming.

Between the forests and the rice paddies, you'll find pastolan, the pasturelands where our livestock graze. Cows, carabaos, horses, they wander around eating grass and growing fat. And scattered across all this landscape are our ili, our village settlements where we live in our 14 barangays. With only about 40 people per square kilometer, we have plenty of space. Sometimes too much space. When your neighbor lives on the next ridge over, borrowing a cup of rice becomes a serious expedition.

Besao sits at the western edge of Mountain Province, bordering different municipalities in all directions. To our north, we have Tubo and beyond that, Abra province. South of us lies Tadian, which you can reach via the Besao-Tadian Road if you don't mind more winding mountain roads. To the east sits Sagada, the famous tourist town that everyone's heard of. We're only eight kilometers away from Sagada, about thirty minutes by car if you drive carefully and don't stop too often to take pictures of the views. To our west is Quirino in Ilocos Sur.

Being so close to Sagada has its advantages. The tourists who visit Sagada sometimes discover us too, wandering over to see what the less famous neighbor looks like. We're close enough to benefit from having visitors, but far enough off the main tourist path to keep our quiet character. The provincial capital Bontoc is about 25 kilometers away, and the mountain city of Baguio, where many of our young people go to study or work, sits 150 kilometers distant. Far enough to feel remote, close enough to reach when needed.

Our elevation gives us cool, temperate weather all year round. While people in the lowlands are melting in the heat, we're up here wearing jackets and sometimes complaining that it's too cold to dry our clothes properly. The damp clothes hanging on the line for days become a running joke. In the colder months, we build bonfires in the dap-ay to keep warm, gathering around the flames to tell stories and make decisions and just enjoy the heat.

But the same elevation that gives us pleasant weather also brings risks. These steep slopes that provide such dramatic views become dangerous when heavy rains fall. Landslides can cut off our roads in minutes, isolating communities from each other and from the outside world. The elevation gradients that create perfect conditions for different crops also channel rainwater into destructive torrents. Climate change has made this worse. The abnormally heavy rains we get nowadays, they're stronger and more frequent than what our grandparents experienced. The land can't absorb that much water that fast. Flash floods and soil erosion happen more often. The dry paddies especially suffer, their soil washing away when storms hit at the start of the rainy season, before the rice plants have grown enough to hold the earth in place.

The most sophisticated thing about Besao's geography isn't something you can see on any map. It's the knowledge system our people developed over countless generations to work with this challenging terrain. We have names and categories for every type of land. Ili means village settlements. Payeo means ricefields. Uma or um-a are the swidden farms. Pastolan refers to pasturelands. Ginawang are the river systems. Pagpag means forests in general, while batangan specifically refers to pine forests. Each type of land has its own management protocols, its own rules and customs, refined through centuries of careful observation and experience.

The Agricultural Stone Calendar of Gueday, created by the ancient Agawa people, shows just how accurately our ancestors understood the cycles of weather, agriculture, and celestial bodies. They watched the stars, tracked the seasons, noted when certain plants bloomed or when certain birds appeared, and encoded all this knowledge in stones. No computers, no written books, just careful observation and brilliant thinking. Sometimes I wonder if we've gotten smarter with all our modern technology, or if we've just gotten better at forgetting what we used to know.

Our knowledge system is rooted in the Kankanaey values of inayan and lawa. These concepts forbid causing harm to anything, living or non-living. We believe in spirits called pinading dwelling in forests, trees, rivers, and stones. We believe in Kabunyan, the Supreme Being who watches over everything. Now, you might think these are just spiritual beliefs, nice stories we tell ourselves. But actually, they function as environmental ethics. When you believe that spirits live in the forest, you don't carelessly cut down trees. When you believe rivers have consciousness, you don't pollute them. When you believe mountains are sacred, you treat them with respect. This belief system has protected our geography better than any environmental law written by faraway legislators who've never set foot in our mountains.

These days, our geography faces new challenges. Our population has been dropping. In 2015, we had 7,035 people living here. By 2020, that number fell to 6,873. Where did they go? Our young people leave for the cities, looking for work, seeking education, chasing dreams of easier lives with less backbreaking labor and more money. We don't blame them. Life in the mountains is hard. But each person who leaves takes with them knowledge that might not come back. Who will maintain the terraces when the young people are all gone? Who will remember the proper rituals for planting and harvest? Who will know which spirits live in which trees?

Climate change is altering the patterns that guided our agriculture for centuries. The calendar that worked for the ancient Agawa people might need adjustment as rainfall becomes less predictable. The dry season gets drier, the wet season brings floods. We adapt because we've always adapted. That's how our people survived this long. But adaptation has limits.

Still, the fundamental geography endures. The mountains rise above the clouds just as they always have. The rivers carve through valleys with the same energy they showed a thousand years ago. The forests cloak the slopes in green, breathing quietly through the seasons. Besao remains what it has always been, a highland sanctuary where geography shapes everything, where land and people and culture and spirit are woven together so tightly you can't separate them even if you tried.

If all this talk has made you want to experience our geography for yourself, you're welcome to visit. Come stand on Mount Mogao's viewpoint and watch the clouds drift through the valleys below like slow-moving ghosts. Trek to our remote barangays and see how the landscape transforms as you go higher or lower. Walk through our pine forests where management practices stretch back through generations, where every tree has been thought about by someone's great-great-grandfather.

We're just thirty minutes from Sagada if you have a car. The Besao-Sagada Road will bring you here, or you can come via the Besao-Tadian Road. Fair warning though, we don't have fancy DOT-accredited hotels here in Besao itself. Most visitors stay in Sagada and come here for day trips. The jeepneys run between Sagada and Besao regularly enough, so you don't need your own vehicle if you're comfortable with local transportation and don't mind some bumpy rides.

The geography that shaped our Kankanaey survival strategies over thousands of years can reshape your understanding too. Here in Besao, geography isn't something abstract you study in textbooks. It's the terraced field that feeds a family their dinner. It's the pine forest that provides firewood to keep children warm on cold nights. It's the river that irrigates crops when it's gentle and destroys homes when it's angry. It's the mountain that serves as both a practical landmark for navigation and a sacred space for spiritual communion.

This is geography as it should be understood, not from satellite images and statistics alone, but from walking the worn footpaths, feeling the cold morning air on your face, tasting the rice grown in ancient terraces, listening to the wind in the pines. This is geography learned from living with the land, from depending on it, from respecting it, from loving it despite its harshness and challenges.

So there you have it. That's Besao, our home in the highlands. The fire is getting low now. Do you want to add more wood? Just take some from that pile over there. And if you're staying for dinner, I hope you like rice. We have plenty of that here, thanks to our terraces and our hard-working people and the spirits that watch over us from the mountains.

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