As our hardy band of determined middleaged guys undertook the final assault of Pulag, hoping to crest its famous peak in a blaze of imagined glory, the muffled roar of jet engines far, far above broke the magic of the moment. I realized how futile it was to try to escape the world, even this far away from its strife-torn venues.

Later, sitting amid drifting mists of passing clouds on the tuft of the world's smallest and softest bamboo plants, which covered much of the summit's alpine grasslands, I learned something from our guide about why the park was suddenly closed to outsiders last December.

According to him, the Kalanguya and Ibaloi peoples in the area believe that Mt. Pulag is a sacred place, because this is where our souls go after we die. They bury their dead in caves scattered around its edelweiss-covered slopes, presumably to make the final journey easier. The park was closed because trekkers going there, particularly foreigners, had been behaving in ways repulsive to the native people's religious and cultural sensitivities.

He hinted darkly of noisy nocturnal activities and destructive behavior as the reasons visitors were turned away last December just before the millenium celebrations, including a very large group of Americans and Europeans from the environmental activist group, Greenpeace. Ironically, the park's slick new full-color brochure, which rangers were handing out at its Protected Area Office, declares it to be "a special project supported by a grant from the European Union."

Newly empowered by the National Integrated Protected Areas Programme, the Kabayan town council ordered the closure last year, banning everyone from its storied pine zones and elfin oak forests, which are unique in the Philippines to highlands above 8,000 feet. Biodiversity is written all over the face of this mountain. Its 11,550 hectares contain many rare plants and animals, which have been the target of foreign botanical and zoological collectors for years. The sights and scents of its primeval forests, covered in garments of green and gold, dappled purples and deepest reds, have always enthralled me and drawn me back here.

But it was ignorance of and lack of respect for the religious significance of the mountain that seems to have angered some local elders, precipitating the months-long closure to mountaineers and trekkers. Their simple beliefs may seem navive, even quaint, compared to the highly elaborated concepts of heaven, purgatory and hell, of virtue and sin, of reward and punishment in the afterlife, that characterize the predominant Catholic majority's own beliefs. Yet, what might some grizzled old Cordillera shaman have to say about our own practices at Lent, such as the multiple crucifixions and bloody flagellations that will again be reported by the foreign press to an incredulous world?

Of course, the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, protecting even atheists and other nonbelievers of organized worship. But perhaps, not enough is done to protect minorities from unintended or unrecognized tyrannies of the majority.