These photos of the High Atlas mountains in Morocco were taken on a trek in August 1993 to the remote region around Ighil M'Goun, where small but thriving villages scattered through the varied landscape are home to the Berbers – hardy, friendly and hospitable – a mountain people with a way of life that's hardly changed over many years.
In the 10 days of the trek, despite some language difficulties, we became good friends with the Berber muleteers who managed to persuade their sure-footed mules to transport the worst of our overweight baggage through the mountains, and when we arrived back in their village they honoured us by inviting us into their homes.
The High Atlas mountains offer some of the most impressive mountain walking anywhere, with many opportunities for good mountain photography. At 4000 metres, M'Goun itself is only 100m lower in altitude than Jbel Toubkal, the highest summit in North Africa. For the first few days of our trek we climbed gradually from about 1500m to the plateau below Ighil M'Goun at 3500m. But before setting off by minibus for the foothills of the High Atlas we had a day to look around Marrakech...
Photo Notes: Most of these photos were taken on Kodak Ektachrome film using a Nikon F3 fitted with a 35-135mm zoom lens. For a few shots I used a 20mm lens on the F3 (the photo on the right, for example), and colour negative film in a Minox 35ML. All were hand-held. In such a dry landscape dust was a terrible problem.
This diary is now organized as four pages: page 1 | page 2 | page 3 | page 4 |
