What's it like to climb Mount Toubkal?

It starts gently and deceptively in Imlil, a walnut-shaded village at the trailhead, where you shoulder your daypack and set off up the valley past terraced fields and a roadside shrine, mules clopping alongside loaded with other people's gear. For the first hours it's a beautiful, steady plod — the path climbs, the villages thin out, the river tumbles beside you — and you think, with the optimism of the not-yet-tired, that this might not be so bad.

Then the real ascent grinds in. The trail tilts up and stays up, the green falls away to bare rock and grey scree, and you settle into the slow, lung-working rhythm of altitude, stopping more often than you'd like to admit, the air noticeably thinner with every hundred metres. By the time you reach the stone refuge at around 3,200 metres your legs are done, and you eat an enormous tagine, watch the light die on the peaks, and try to sleep in a cold dormitory bunk knowing the alarm is set for the small hours.

Summit morning is the crux, and it's genuinely hard. You're up at three or four in pitch dark and biting cold, head-torch on, and you climb for hours up a relentless slope of loose scree and snow, one slow step at a time, the head-torches of other climbers strung out above you like a thread of stars. The thin air makes everything an effort and the cold gets into your fingers, but you grind on through the dark — and then the sky starts to pale, and you haul yourself onto the iron pyramid marking the summit just as the sun breaks.

And what a payoff it is. From 4,167 metres the entire High Atlas lies beneath you, range after range washed pink and gold by the low sun, the plains toward Marrakech swimming in haze and, on the clearest days, a hint of the Sahara far to the south. You're cold, wrecked, slightly giddy from the altitude, and grinning like an idiot. It's a serious trek — you need decent fitness, warm kit, and ideally a local guide — but you don't need to be a mountaineer, and standing on the roof of North Africa at dawn is a feeling that doesn't fade.