MIDDLE ATLAS TREKS AND TRACKS

Much of the Middle Atlas region south of Azrou is a high altitude plateau without the deep valleys seen in other mountain regions. This is similar to the Altiplano de Granada (high plains of Granada) where I live in Spain. The advantage of high plateau is that trekking can be fairly gentle, enabling participants to concentrate on enjoying the natural beauty rather than puffing and panting up steep slopes.



Locals collecting drinking water from fresh water springs between Azrou and Ifrane.




This beautiful scene with cedar trees is further along the piste denoted by the black-and-white dotted line on the map in post 3.




In the spring time Morocco is so green, it’s hard to imagine you are in Africa (though note the distant volcanic cinder cones). The Middle Atlas ties with the Anti Atlas for my favourite area of Morocco.



Lovely smooth beaten earth surface (when dry), travelling through an area of evergreen Holm Oak trees.

GPS navigation in Morocco is much easier nowadays with the detailed tracks shown on Openstreetmaps, but ten years ago when I was exploring it was much harder—some notes from the time...

"I found that the zaouia near Ifrane was marked there as Zaouia d'Ifrane hence my confusion, when in reality it should have been marked Zaouia Sidi Adbsellam. I decided to visit the other zaouia which was south of Ain Leuh. No roads were shown in the area on either the Olaf or Garmin GPS maps, but the paper ones showed an approach from the west which wasn't much use as I was to the north east! I decided to look for a road or piste from the Ain Leuh direction and set off accordingly. I worked out roughly where Zaouia Oued Ifrane should be by triangulation using paper maps and the tourist info as a guide and set a waypoint to point me in roughly the right direction. Coming out of Ain Leuh I found an easy piste heading in the right direction and whenever I came to a junction of pistes made a guess as to which to follow."



And lo and behold, I found it. The area between Ain Leuh (literally ‘spring of wood’ due to the cedar forest) and Zaouia Ifrane (literally ‘religious school near caves’) has a high incidence of limestone with waterfalls dropping from a plateau above.



You can see the cornices formed by the calcium traces in the streams. This is prime trekking country with several gites d’etape where you get dinner, bed and breakfast for between 150 and 220 dh/night.





Some more examples of limestone in the 'valley of the rocks' near Ifrane. I named these outcrops ’topographical oceans’ after one of the album covers of Yes prog rock group.




In limestone areas the water tends to travel underground and the scenery of the region is described as ‘karst’ with features such as poljes (depressions), sinkholes and caves. This is near Taza in the north east section of the Middle Atlas.



Goufre Friouato near Taza is a 270m-deep sinkhole.

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)