Mount Toubkal

I’d told Lia for months that I wanted to stand on the highest point in North Africa, and she’d rolled her eyes every time, but when we finally landed in Marrakech in early June, she was the one checking the weather forecast for Imlil obsessively. We hired a guide there, a soft-spoken Amazigh man named Hassan whose family has been leading trekkers up this mountain for three generations, and he laughed when I asked if 4,167 meters would be hard. “Not technical,” he said, “just long.” That distinction would matter more than I expected.

The walk in from Imlil to Aroumd felt almost gentle, mule trains passing us loaded with gas canisters and crates of eggs bound for the refuge, kids waving from doorways of stone houses stacked against the hillside. It’s easy to forget, staring up at that bare grey pyramid of rock, that an entire economy of Berber villages sustains every ascent — the muleteers, the refuge cooks, the guides like Hassan who grew up on these slopes. Somewhere in the lower valley, he pointed out, Barbary macaques still move through the juniper forest, though we never spotted one ourselves.

We spent the night at the Neltner refuge, a crowded, cheerful bunkhouse at around 3,200 meters where I barely slept between the altitude headache and the 4:30am wake-up call. Hassan handed us headlamps and we set off in the dark, scrambling over scree that shifted underfoot with every step, the toubkal massif slowly turning silver as the sky lightened behind us. The final stretch is a grind rather than a climb — no ropes, no technical moves, just thin air and stubbornness — but reaching that summit marker, watching the whole High Atlas unfold in every direction with the Sahara’s edge somewhere hazy to the south, made every wheezing step worth it.

We came down legs shaking, ravenous, already talking about coming back in winter to see it under snow — though Hassan was quick to warn us that’s an entirely different mountain then, one that demands crampons and real mountaineering experience rather than just stubborn legs.

When to go: The standard two-day route via the Neltner refuge is best tackled between April and October; outside that window, snow and ice turn Toubkal into a proper winter mountaineering objective requiring crampons and experience.