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Atlas Mountains

EXOTIC MOUNTAIN PLAYGROUND

Reaching altitudes of over 4000m, the Atlas Mountains stretch across the shoulder of northwest Africa from western Morocco to Tunisia. Wild, rugged and easily accessible from Marrakech, today the highest summits and the valleys that radiate from them have become a popular destination for European climbers and trekkers, for whom they represent the nearest exotic mountain playground.

Having served an apprenticeship climbing mostly in north Wales, the Lake District and Scotland, the Atlas were my first ‘big’ mountains when I went there with an expedition in 1965. Apart from the Berber inhabitants we met in the valleys, and the odd goatherd in surprisingly remote places, we had them to ourselves. There were no commercial trekking companies in those days, and it would be another 15 years before the first English-language guidebook appeared. Cheap flights were unknown, and we made our journey to and from Morocco through France and Spain on the back of a three-ton ex-army truck.

That journey was an adventure in itself. But it was the mountains, and experiences won there, that had the greatest impact on me. They changed my life. We climbed all and everything that appealed, crossed cols and visited remote valleys and villages, and on one of the 4000m summits I made two decisions which, on reflection, seemed incompatible. The first was to marry my girlfriend, and the second was to abandon the job in which I was working Monday to Friday, looking forward to Saturday, and try to find work among mountains. Nearly fifty years on, I have no reason to regret either decision.

Exactly twenty-one years after that first visit, I returned as a journalist to accompany a trekking party making a tour of the central block of the High Atlas. In the decades between those two visits the mountains appeared to have changed very little. But my life had been transformed.