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Shortly after dawn, the massive southwest or Yalung face of Kangchenjunga is revealed in all its glory (Chapter 47)
Local guide Hörst Kaschnig shows the way on a via ferrata in the Kamnik-Savinja mountains of Slovenia (Chapter 45)
Alan Payne in the Gokyo valley – our early treks in the Himalaya, using simple teahouses for accommodation, led through some memorable landscapes
Group treks rely for their success on the strength and goodwill of porters who carry the loads; they are the unsung heroes of the Himalaya
In the Langtang village of Syabru an old man watches the world go by (Chapter 51)
The four Dolpo women whose voices echoed a ‘song of the hidden land’ (Chapter 59)
A typical Sherpa house in Phortse at the mouth of the Gokyo valley (Chapter 61)
Ploughing with buffalo – an iconic post-harvest scene in the Himalayan foothills
On the edge of Khumjung, a solitary chorten, prayer flags and mani stones direct attention towards Ama Dablam
The silent Bhutanese woman who became my shadow on the way to Cheri Gompa (Chapter 63)
Cheri Gompa stands high above the Thimpu Chhu in the Bhutanese foothills (Chapter 63)
This makeshift bridge took us across a tributary of the Buri Gandaki on my most recent trek around Manaslu (Chapter 66)
My long-time friend, Kirken Sherpa (second from left), poses with our group of friends after crossing the Larkya La on the Manaslu Circuit (Chapter 66)
Figures in silhouette prepare to bivouac by a cold lake on Corsica’s Monte Rotondo (Chapter 68)
A symbolic model ark contains the summit book on Turkey’s Mount Ararat – sadly, Noah’s signature does not appear in it (Chapter 73)
Mehmut’s yayla on the slopes of Mount Ararat (Chapter 73)
In benevolent mood, Huascaran looks down on the memorial garden where once stood the town of Yungay (Chapter 74)
The team of Quechua Indians and their burros that accompanied our journey around Peru’s Cordillera Blanca (Chapter 75)
Atlas Mountains
EXOTIC MOUNTAIN PLAYGROUND
Reaching altitudes of over 4000m, the Atlas Mountains stretch across the shoulder of northwest Africa from western Morocco to Tunisia. Wild, rugged and easily accessible from Marrakech, today the highest summits and the valleys that radiate from them have become a popular destination for European climbers and trekkers, for whom they represent the nearest exotic mountain playground.
Having served an apprenticeship climbing mostly in north Wales, the Lake District and Scotland, the Atlas were my first ‘big’ mountains when I went there with an expedition in 1965. Apart from the Berber inhabitants we met in the valleys, and the odd goatherd in surprisingly remote places, we had them to ourselves. There were no commercial trekking companies in those days, and it would be another 15 years before the first English-language guidebook appeared. Cheap flights were unknown, and we made our journey to and from Morocco through France and Spain on the back of a three-ton ex-army truck.
That journey was an adventure in itself. But it was the mountains, and experiences won there, that had the greatest impact on me. They changed my life. We climbed all and everything that appealed, crossed cols and visited remote valleys and villages, and on one of the 4000m summits I made two decisions which, on reflection, seemed incompatible. The first was to marry my girlfriend, and the second was to abandon the job in which I was working Monday to Friday, looking forward to Saturday, and try to find work among mountains. Nearly fifty years on, I have no reason to regret either decision.
Exactly twenty-one years after that first visit, I returned as a journalist to accompany a trekking party making a tour of the central block of the High Atlas. In the decades between those two visits the mountains appeared to have changed very little. But my life had been transformed.
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TRAVELS IN AN ANCIENT LAND
1965: At 21 I was wide-eyed and eager for adventure, and the Atlas Mountains were seductive in their wild mystery – so different from anything I’d known before. With fitness and misplaced confidence rather than any natural ability, we climbed with naïve ambition – yet we survived. But perhaps more than any vertical activity, it was the journeys made to distant valleys that held the greatest appeal and which now come alive more vividly in the memory.
This land seemed to belong to the Old Testament. It felt culturally ancient, part of another world. Sun-baked and barren in summer, it had rock-strewn canyons where goats searched for something on which to graze. From the summits of snow-free mountains that filled every horizon, a golden haze told of the Sahara. There were no reminders of the twentieth century, and the dreamy-eyed goatherd who stood at the edge of our camp each morning could have been descended from Abraham.
Under his gaze three of us left our tents behind, and with rucksacks packed for a few days of exploration climbed towards the head of the valley, bore left to cross a 3500m pass, then fought a way down the other side among a turmoil of rocks and boulders through which a mule-trail unravelled into an arid gorge. In its bed waist-high thistles were the only signs of vegetation, and apart from mule dung and the black pebbles of goat droppings nothing broke the monotony of rust-coloured stone. As cliffs hemmed us in, our voices spoke back at us in echoes that hung for long moments in the air before being vanquished by the clatter of rock upon rock.
Late in the day we turned a spur to discover, clinging to the hillside like a series of swallows’ nests, a village of flat-roofed houses commanding a wonderland of terraced fields and groups of trees. The silver of overflowing irrigation ditches flashed in the sunlight; on a level with the village, and all below it, the mountain slope was vibrantly green and fertile; above the houses, bare crags offered a stark contrast.
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