What is the High Atlas beyond Toubkal like (M'Goun, Saghro)?

Toubkal, North Africa's highest peak, gets the headlines and the crowds, but the High Atlas is enormous and most of it is gloriously empty. When experienced trekkers ask me where to go to escape the Toubkal queues, I point them east to the M'Goun and south to Saghro — two ranges with completely different characters that between them show the Atlas at its wildest. These are not day-trip destinations; they are multi-day trekking regions, and that is exactly the point.

The M'Goun massif, around Morocco's second-highest summit (Ighil M'Goun, just over 4,000m), is a high, rolling plateau cut by dramatic gorges — the Tessaout and the famous M'Goun gorges where you wade through the river itself between towering walls. It is rose country on its lower flanks, around the valley of Bou Tharar and Kelaa M'Gouna, and the classic treks link remote Berber villages, mule tracks, transhumance pastures and the spectacular Aït Bouguemez "happy valley." The trekking is less technical than Toubkal but longer and more committing, and the sense of being deep in living mountain country is profound.

Jebel Saghro is something else entirely — technically a separate volcanic range bridging the High Atlas and the Sahara, a stark, dark, eroded landscape of black rock towers, fingers and mesas with almost no greenery. Its great virtue is winter: while the high Atlas is under snow, Saghro stays trekkable, and it is the traditional winter grazing ground of the semi-nomadic Aït Atta, whose tents you still pass on the trails. Walking here among the bizarre rock formations of Bab n'Ali, with nomad encampments and total silence, is one of the most atmospheric experiences in Moroccan trekking.

I am honest that both regions demand more than Toubkal: you need several days, a good local guide and muleteer, and reasonable fitness, and infrastructure is basic gîtes and bivouacs rather than refuges with crowds. But that is the trade — for solitude, real Berber and nomad encounters, and landscapes few foreigners ever see, the M'Goun and Saghro are the High Atlas at its best. M'Goun suits late-spring-to-autumn walkers; Saghro is the winter and shoulder-season gem.