Short route within JBEL SAGHRO traverse: /Tagdilt - Igli/

TWO DAYS TREK - 30km (4 days total trip leaving and returning from Marrakech)

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CAUTION: This walk was done with a high dosis of improvisation and knowledge from past expeditions. While the terrain is not very demanding or technical, and the duration is short, the difficulty of the whole trip in late Summer (Sept 2023) is high due to complete isolation. No near roads or fast rescue possible. No signal most of the time. Just 3 sources of water. All rivers dried. I'm sharing the route and some information here in the hopes of throwing some useful light on the paths status in case someone might find it useful to have as reference. You should NEVER take this as an official route, and in the 80% of cases I strongly recommend hiring the many cheerful Moroccan guides of the Anti-Atlas range.

[ES]
CUIDADO: Esta caminata, aunque corta, puede ser potencialmente peligrosa. Pese a que el terreno no es muy demandante o técnico, el grado de aislamiento hace que cualquier accidente pueda complicarse fácilmente. Las fuentes de agua son escasas (solo encontramos tres, todos los ríos estaban secos), el cruce con otros viajeros también. No hay carreteras o vías cercanas de acceso. Tampoco hay cobertura la mayoría del tiempo. Es enormemente recomendable contratar guías locales de la zona Anti-Atlas.
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DAY 0

Marrakech > Ourzazate > Boumalne Dadès > Tagaldit

DAY 1

From Boumalne Dadès (2hours collective taxi from Ourzazate), we took a private taxi (DH200 non negotiable) to Tagaldit. Started the walk around 9AM a little before from where the mark shows.
Half an hour through it, there’s a water source from local agriculture irrigation. This source might be disconnected. If owners are around, they will give you access to it (as any other encounter we had, people were willing to share their water gladly).

By 11:30AM it was hot enough to start making considerations about our approach to this trek. The thing with these journeys is that heat is by far the biggest objective risk.
As said, we depended on water sources from the trail, that we then purified. Walking in the top heat hours meant accelerating the consumption of that water. So we stopped and made the decision of resuming around 4:30PM when the Sun had lowered down.

FIRST CAMP (picnic + heat protection): 12PM to 4:30PM, progressive loss of shadow, lost it completely by 3PM. We used a tarp to create some shelter from the Sun. Ate the last food we bought at Boumalne Dadès. That heat peak was enough for us to drink almost all our water, so we returned to the previously mentioned first water source. Took us about an extra hour. Then resumed the walk around 5:30PM.

Night caught us soon (around 7:15PM), but the trail was mostly visible (with some imagination, intuition and a constant contrast with GPS position). When I say the trail is visible I mean sings of crossing such as broken branches, a footprint, mule feces, etc., it is not a marked trail and sometimes it is possible to lose it completely for a bit. This part is mostly ascent, and you might need to half-climb some big rocks. There’s a final segment of about an hour through a dried river bed which implies loss of energy and slow progress by going up and down.
By 12AM we decide to stop to rest in an intersection and get an early walk ahead of the Sun.

SECOND CAMP (sleep): 1AM to 5AM. Tent right in an intersection, inside a dried river bed. We just ate a couple of energy bars as were too sleepy to cook. The temperature lowered to roughly 10º C. Enough to make me use two warm layers (talking fleece + third external layer + a goose sleeping bag for low temperatures that was probably too much but gave me a super nice sleep).

DAY 2

With somewhat of a slow wake and camp-break, we proceeded up-hill to beat the sunrise for an hour or so before reaching a ridge and fueling us with some dehydrated food + two sips of coffee, around 7AM. We had very limited water and couldn’t risk running out of it. Shortly after we resumed the walk, we encountered a group hiking the opposite direction. They had guides, mules, etc. We exchanged some words (luckily one guide spoke Spanish) and we learnt that 30 min from our position there was a small group of houses (Almou n'Ourag) where we could refill our water deposits. They also gave us an estimate of 3 hours until our final destination (Igli). As it usually happens with mountain people, it was not 3 hours at all. But we were relieved to have a confirmation of being on-track and the perspective of water.

The promised encounter arrived at more or less the estimated time. A welcoming man, woman, and baby. He poured many glasses of delicious tea, invited us even more tasty bread, and invigorating dates. He had a very unique playfulness.

We refilled our bottles, and were told again our destiny was 3hours ahead. The clock marked around 10:30AM, and I knew we wouldn’t reach Igli before the peak heat hours appeared.

Around two hours on a trail of mostly ascent, we found the most precious gift. A place with three gorgeous ponds. It had also a beautiful casted shadow, too tempting not to decide to stay and let the Sun make its shift. The day was too a bit more cloudier than the previous one (not much, in any case, but it seemed grayer to us).
We took shelter in the shadow, cooked some meal with our now endless water, freshened up, had a good dosis of coffee (always with caution as it is never a complete good idea in this kind of landscapes due to the dehydrating properties of it), and went on exploring the many topics our mouths can give life to. It is always a treasure to do a quest of this kind with one of the people you admire most!

Around 4:30PM, with happy bellies and robust water bottles, we got in our feet to do the last segment of the trail.


The scenery had been pretty up to this point, with numerous dry riverbeds home to beetles with lots of character and blue-tailed lizards, but neither of us were prepared for what we saw next as we emerged from our little oasis.
After an hour of gentle ascent, one of the most majestic scenes that the two of us had ever seen opened before us. Wrapped in the golden evening Sun, rocky shapes taken from other universes seemed to stand guard over an extensive violet valley in the distance. They were tubular giants, imposing presences that guarded a solemn silence.
The sight of these shapes slowed our pace noticeably. We were delighted. There was a feeling of immeasurable fortune, the kind that you feel when you know you are in the center of a perfect present. If we had scheduled the path differently, we most likely wouldn't have witnessed this gift. Hours ago we were considering whether to continue or rest near the water ponds. If we had not stopped, we would had never witnessed the sunset Sun traveling through the recesses of the giants of rock, chiseling out characters and stories that with absolute certainty exist in another reality.

From this point it was all downhill, and we quickened our pace a little to avoid possible stretches of loose rock lacking good visibility. We both agreed that making ascents at night was much preferable thank going down without a complete confidence of where you’re putting your feet. So we avoided being caught by night in that slope.

We arrived at Igli around 7:30PM in double the time that the people we met on the way told us. And although the surreal rocky landscape had added a few minutes of contemplation, it was really unlikely to have covered the terrain in less than 5 hours.

Igli is a settlement that serves as refuge point for trekkers and tours. Some people camp there and others book a room with perfect temperature. There are also hot showers and they serve hot full meals. You might get the chance to charge your devices. There’s also a small shop to buy supplies.

Usually, the people doing the complete Saghro traverse, use Igli as a start or end of a stage. But as we were short in time, Igli was the end of the walk for us. In order to get back, we agreed on a transportation an hour walking West from Igli the next morning. It took us to N’kob, and from there we returned to Ourzazate.


DAY 3

N’kob > Ourzazate > Marrakech

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MAIN RISKS and how we approached them:

-phone battery. This was our main concern, since it was our primary orientation tool. We carried two power banks and kept it in power-saving mode, but would definitely implement a solar charger next time.
-isolation. We were extra careful with every step and did constant verification that we were in-route to avoid getting lost and in uneven wild terrain that could be prone to accidents.
-heat and dehydration. We scheduled the hours when we'd walk so they were out of the peak of heat hours. Also carried electrolyte tablets and we always had a 1L bottle filed with it.
-very little water sources. We avoided the hours of heat exposure, rationalised the liquids, and made sure we didn’t enter in a dehydration state.
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Y para terminar, un pedazo en español sobre el escenario más evocador que he visto en mi vida:

(…) El paisaje había sido bonito hasta aquí, con numerosos lechos de ríos secos, hogar de escarabajos con bastante personalidad y lagartijas de cola azul, pero ninguno de los dos estábamos preparados para lo que vimos a continuación, al salir de nuestro pequeño oasis.
Tras una hora de suave ascenso, se abría ante nosotros una de las escenas más majestuosas que los dos habíamos visto nunca. Envueltas en el sol dorado del atardecer, formas rocosas sacadas de otros universos parecían hacer guardia de un extenso valle violáceo a lo lejos. Eran gigantes tubulares, imponentes presencias que custodiaban un silencio solemne.
La visión de estas formas retrasó nuestro paso notablemente. Estábamos encantados. Había una sensación de inconmensurable fortuna, la que se da cuando te sabes en el centro de un presente perfecto. Si hubiéramos dividido el camino de otra forma, muy probablemente no habríamos presenciado este regalo. Horas atrás sopesábamos si seguir o descansar en los pozos de agua. De no habernos detenido, nunca habríamos presenciado el sol vespertino viajando por los recovecos de los gigantes de roca, cincelando personajes e historias que existen en otra realidad con total certeza. (…)