ASCENT TO THE TOP OF NORTH AFRICA! An Independence-Day Adventure

4-7-2008

I took it upon myself to “top off” my time in Morocco by celebrating my last week here with the ultimate Moroccan hiking trip. Just outside of Marrakech, in the High Atlas Mountains, lies Mt. Toubkal, the highest mountain in all of North Africa—how could one leave this place before taming that beast!

At 4,167m, Toubkal is only about half the size of Mt. Everest, and though the peak is covered with snow most of the year, almost all of it melts for the summer—so no ice picks, cords, or boots were needed. Since the mountain trail is described as a “hike” (no straight vertical climbs), I figured I’d just head out there with my tennis shoes and a sweatshirt to see what happened. Besides, my plan for the 3-day hike would put me at the peak on July 4^th—what a way to celebrate Independence Day!

The first day was a relatively straightforward hike into the mountain range from a nearby village. It took about 5-6 hours to reach the refuge “hut” (which is actually a pretty posh cabin that holds a few hundred) at the foot of Toubkal, where people spend the night to rest up and get used to the altitude change. At the refuge, there were expeditions of climbers from Spain, France, England, and Germany, all with Moroccan guides and trusty mules for supplies. I was the lone American, so most people didn’t talk to me, having assumed (rightly) that I was never educated in any of their languages, as it tends to go with Americans. But I had a lot of fun flooring them by walking past their little groups and hamming it up with their Moroccan guides in seemingly fluent Arabic. Score one for the homeland!

The next morning, I followed the advice I got from my new Moroccan-guide buddies and woke up dark-and-early at 5:30 to set out at first light. This is when most of the big groups set out and I had been advised to follow them up, as this is the part of the climb where, without a guide, one can end up in one of Toubkal’s infamous fields of “scree” (a bunch of loose gravel) that simply slides out from under your feet, talking you with it. So I caught up with a group of Brits who had set out before me (and weren’t afraid of being linguistically incompatible with an American) and followed them up.

The climb was steep and the view breathtaking as we slowly neared the top of the mountain range to see it all from above. The other peaks around Toubkal, however, were still so high that we couldn’t see exactly what we were climbing towards, but we traversed on. Then a little further up, the wind kicked in. No one really mentions wind when advising mountain climbers. They’ll talk about the cold, or the slippery scree (tripping my way up the rock-slide, though I was glad to be following a guided group, I couldn’t imagine the scree being that much worse off of this so called “path”), but never about the wind. Already tottering on loose gravel, we’d all duck down and brace ourselves as a big gust smacked into us, wait until it died down, scurry up a few more steps, then brace for the next gust.

The wind let up towards the top and we could finally see the far off peak of Toubkal marked with a big metal pyramid. Here, the group I’d been following stopped for a break, but as we were so close to the top (little did I know it was still 55 minutes… tricky mountains!), I didn’t want to break my hiking-rhythm. So I broke of from the Brits to go-it alone (didn’t realize the July 4^th symbolism until later).

I caught up with a French couple who helped me up the rest of the way (again with the 1776 symbolism) and together we made it to the top of North Africa! Emerging into the panoramic view, the wind figured it was appropriate to die down for dramatic effect as the mountain range spread below us. Aside from the anthem-singing, flag-waving Spanish group who had come up a few minutes before, it was quite peaceful. From the top, one can see the entire High Atlas range and even some of the tiny villages way down below (“What? It took me two days to come from THERE? It looks like I could just roll down and be there in 20 minutes…). The altitude had made my hands swell up to arthritic proportions, but I still managed to take some pictures of the French couple. By that time, the British group hade made it up and—I kid you not—sat down for tea and biscuits.

I sat and chatted with one of the Moroccan guides I hadn’t yet met and he introduced me to a Swiss woman who had hired him (the mountain beginning to feel like a UN meeting). After they found out I had come up alone, they invited me to come down with them. I figured it’d be savfer with a guide, so I quickly agreed. “Although,” said the friendly lady said with a mischievous Swiss-German accent, “we’re going back a different way than we came up. I hope that’s all right.”

Apparently, in her dialect, “different” translates from “death defying.” Well known fact that I should have remembered: The Swiss are bad-to-the-bone mountain climbers, blonde, and bred with a sixth-sense drawing them up, up, and away. The “different” path we took down had a steep, spectacular view of the abyss one would certainly sprawl into upon a single misstep—missteps being a certainty since we were then on steep-scree that functioned like a giant gravel slip-&-slide. In light of that, I spent an inordinate amount of time tumbling to my backside banana-peel-sketch style (as falling backwards is much preferred to falling forward where there is nothing, nothing to stop you), but the Swiss lady and her guide were patient with me until I found my scree-legs (sorry, bad pun).

One would think that going up a mountain would be the tough part, and physically, it is. But gravity is like the mafia—it’s straightforward enough when you know you’re working against it, but when you attempt to work with it, that’s when you have to be constantly vigilant of it whacking you out of the blue.

Mountain descents like this are surely where the term “steep learning curve” came from. Though, oddly enough, certain death was far less of a motivator than my mother’s worry-confirmed “I told you so.” Either way, after a few hours, my butt got a break as I started to figure things out.

We hiked (Well, they hiked. I slid.) past a field of wreckage from a military plane that had crashed in the mountains some twenty-odd years ago (Our guide explained this by picking up a hunk of the engine and miming, with airplane sounds, it tumbling down. Then he threw it into a rock with exploding mouth-spitting effects). I suddenly realized that I had read about this wreckage somewhere before. Then it hit me—it had been a passage from my Rough Guide Morocco book. We were on the highly scenic, highly high, back-route. It’s the one the book had advised, “Climbers looking for a challenge may choose this path for the ascent, but we advise that even advanced climbers shouldn’t descend from this path.” Oh boy, now my mother’s REALLY gonna re-kill me when they find my body…

Luckily, fate let this one by, and we made it back to the refuge. I went straight to bed to sleep off an altitude-hangover, then spent the rest of the evening entertaining Moroccan guides by teaching them all the English catch-phrases they could handle (should anyone hike in the High Atlas and hear “The early bird catches the worm,” that’s totally my legacy). I even managed to get a discount from the manager on my room bill for the English lessons.

The next day, I hiked back out of the valley with sore legs, but “Proud to be an American” to the max. I had taken on the mountain, capped off my Moroccan adventure, and learned valuable lessons: A) Never go mountain climbing with the Swiss unless you want to get the scree beat out of you, and B) Nothing, yes, absolutely nothing gets in the way of a proper English tea time.