Mount Kinabalu - the trek to the summit
Mount Kinabalu is an outcrop of granite rising over 4000 mtr above the tropical rainforests of Northern Borneo. It is a very young mountain in geological terms, being less than 1 million years old but still it continues to rise at 5mm per year. Kinabalu is unique in many ways. Not least for its rich diversity of animal and plant life. Many species are only found on this one mountain and its surrounding slopes including several varieties of tree fern. For this reason Kinabalu National Park is now a world heritage site.
The national park is home to 24 species of tree ferns. 22 of these species are from the Cyathea genus with 1 Dicksonia (mollis) and 1 Cibotium (arachnoidium). The trip to Kinabalu combined my two great passions in life; mountain trekking and tree ferns. So together with my newly wed wife, Cate I couldn't wait to get out there and see exactly what this area had to offer. This image on the left epitomises this heavenly combination. This is the view of Mount Kinabalu from the park head quarters with a Cyathea contaminans in the foreground. In this first of two articles I describe our trek to the summit and detail some of the tree ferns we found on the way.
Getting started
Scaling the summit which is officially Low's Peak at 4095.2 mtr is a 2 day affair. Starting at the Timpohon gate at 1850 mtr the intention is to trek up to a series of lodges at Laban Rata at 3272 mtr and stay overnight there. The next day you trek to the summit and all the way back down to park HQ. On the way to Laban Rata are a series of small shelters where you can take a breather. You need them !
After a healthy breakfast Cate and I met our guide at the park HQ at around 7.30am. It is mandatory to have a guide in order to trek the summit path though in truth the trail is so clear and self evident that it is not an essential requirement. They're more of an insurance policy in case you pass out ! We arrived at the Timpohon gate at 8.30am and so began the trek. The weather was very agreeable as it is all over the park. At this altitude the temperatures hover around 20 deg C though the humidity is extremely high so it does not take long for one to build up quite a sweat. This is something that hits you when you arrive at Kinabalu. The surrounding area is true equatorial rainforest with temperatures soaring to over 34 deg C and virtually 100% humidity and then this mountain just appears out of the forest and within just a few miles the whole climate cools. The trip up to Kinabalu park is particularly interesting as the coach winds up the narrow twisty roads the flora changes and the many palms are replaced by tree ferns as you climb higher in altitude.
In this early section of the walk there were very few tree ferns. The odd small Cibotium and some interesting blechnums with very narrow trunks. I'm fairly sure that these are Blechnum fraseri. This blechnum is fairly common in New Zealand also and from what I could see they only grew in the moistest, most humid, dripping wet ground. They are fascinating little 'mini tree ferns'. They are dotted around all over the mountain wherever there is enough shelter and the trunk is around 3/4" diameter, no more. The tallest we saw was around 50cm of trunk, often in clumps.
At this point the trek was going very nicely. The gradient was fairly acceptable and a gentle breeze helped to calm the effects of the high humidity. But then it started to get a little tougher !
It didn't take long for us to find our first tree fern. This Cibotium arachnoidium appeared from a shear 90 degree bank within minutes of the trail beginning. This particular specimen is very young with fronds around 2 or 3 feet long. This species of Cibotium is found only on Kinabalu and parts of Malaysia. They are dotted all around the park HQ and mature examples are truly enormous with fronds over 15 feet long !
I will save more detailed images of these for a later article on the park and surrounding trails but of the few Cibotiums we found on the summit trail most of them were fairly small like this one. The really large ones seem to grow only in cleared areas with little overhead competition.
