Climbing Toubkal in Winter.
As soon as you get off the plane you can see the mountains from Marrakesh airport all covered in snow unless you’ve come in summer, in which case they won’t. We wanted to ski off the summit of northern Africa’s highest peak and that was goal or at least the first goal.
We knew we needed to get to a town called Imlil which is the mountain town from which most people start there trek to the summit. We hadn’t really planned that much apart from booking a flight and making sure we had at least two pairs of socks each and some crampons that fitted the socks.
I was with a mate of mine – Mike. We hadn’t climbed together but had worked together off and on at the fine institution of ‘Outward Bound’ for around three years. This then was our first date.
The baggage handlers at the airport seemed to take a fancy to our skies and this seemed to be a theme that ran throughout the trip. We were stood at the carousel with no bags and no skies long after everyone had headed for Marrakesh town. A chap poked his head through the black plastic drapes that hung separating the carousal and the tarmac outside and asked what we were waiting for. We had to describe each bag before it was put through – strange!!??
We grabbed ourselves some Dirhams and headed out into the open air. Problem one occurs almost immediately when you try and grab a taxi – what price do you want to pay and what price is the taxi driver willing to except? The haggling begins.
We arrived in Imlil after about an hour and were greeted by many people all offering their services from helping you to climb Toubkal, getting food or even to buy a live chicken. We wanted a donkey or something donkey like to help us carry our stuff up the mountain.
I’ve never tried to hire a donkey but it turns out it’s not so hard. We called ours Tamsin and she as strong as an ox and full of beans. Ali the driver of the donkey was also as strong as an ox but we would find that out later. It was about 1:30pm by the time we had sorted out all of our stuff out so we decided to stay the night as we were told it was a 7 hour walk in the snowy conditions. This was the right decision as it had dumped down with snow and even Imlil had about 2 feet in places.
It was freezing that night and we woke at 6:30am to start our walk just after sun up. We packed Tamsin our donkey and headed up the track. We were in front at first but Tamsin soon over took us. We could walk as far as the town Tizi Oussem but from there we would be ski touring up and would have to leave Tamsin behind. We had two strong chaps to help us carry the rest of our kit up to the hut as there was too much snow for poor Tamsin to manage. Mike and me took heavy bags also, put our ski boots on and started up the hill again.
After another 3 hours of hard work we arrived at the old hut and put our stuff inside. I personally prefer the old hut, warm fires, great food, showers!! and great service to boot. We ate like kings that night with all the soup, hot dinner and fruit pudding you could eat.
Due to the hut being at 3200 m you don’t need to get up at stupid a-clock to climb Toubkal, which is nice compared with a lot of the alpine peaks but make no mistake about it – you still have to walk up hill to a high summit.
We started off touring at first but then as the slopes got to steep and icy and we had to switch to ski boots and crampons, walking with our skies strapped to our bags. This looks like a lot of effort and it is. The bag is heavy and the ski boots make walking hard work. You can get very light ski touring skis but we didn’t have these, no we had heavy off-piste monsters. Cool.
After around 3 hours of slogging up hill, in the most amazing weather i will add, we arrived on the summit. You could of put a plastic bag down and it wouldn’t of blown away, it was that still. The views were stunning so we sat a-top the highest mountain in northern Africa and enjoyed some food, drinking and with the small birds that fluttered around looking for scraps, it was all rather splendid.
We strapped our skis on and started down the north ridge so that we could climb Imouzzer 4010 meters as well. It wasn’t too long before a small rock section on the ridge forced us to put crampons back on before then getting down to the saddle and making the ascent back up to Imouzzer summit. After the summit we put our skis back on and made the most breath taking descent down the large gully / slope running west on the north side of Toubkal. The snow was in really good nick with great powder sections and not a track or skier to be seen. Towards the bottom we even grabbed some steep sections (55 degrees) coming down a couloir shoot between rocks.
We headed into the hut that night and felt good with our ascent and descent. Not many people seemed to be up there and certainly not on skis. With the snow that was there this was definitely the best way of getting up there and coming down although a little hard work doing 3000 meters of ascent in ski boots.
