The High Atlas forms a 2,500-kilometre spine across Morocco, its central massif rising to 4,167 metres at Jebel Toubkal, the tallest summit in North Africa. Sixty-seven kilometres south of Marrakech, the asphalt highway climbs through the Moulay Brahim gorge and ends at Imlil, a stone-and-timber village at 1,740 metres that serves as the trailhead for most High Atlas expeditions. The transition is abrupt: red city dust gives way to juniper scrub, terraced barley fields, and the scent of wild thyme carried on thin air. Day trips from Marrakech to Atlas Mountains became a structured tourism product in the 1980s, when European trekking agencies began chartering vans to Imlil and hiring Berber guides for single-day circuits. Before that, the valleys sustained subsistence farming — walnut orchards, apricot groves, irrigation channels hand-carved from granite. The villages remain Berber-speaking; Tashelhit and Tamazight dialects dominate, and the rhythm of life follows the agricultural calendar rather than the tour-bus schedule. Most houses are built from rammed earth and chestnut beams, their flat roofs doubling as drying platforms for corn and medicinal herbs. The Ourika Valley, thirty-two kilometres east of Imlil, offers a gentler gradient. Seven named waterfalls punctuate the valley floor, the highest cascading forty metres over travertine ledges. The trail to Setti Fatma, the uppermost waterfall, passes through groves of Atlas cedar and clusters of corrugated-metal tea stalls that serve mint tea in hand-blown glasses. The valley's microclimate supports vegetation absent from the arid plains: wild rose, oleander, and pockets of holm oak. Atlas Mountains tours typically include a communal Berber lunch — tagine cooked over a wood fire, flatbread baked in a clay oven, olives cured in salt and lemon. Guides are drawn from the local cooperative system, which rotates assignments among registered families to distribute income. The trails themselves are ancient: seasonal transhumance routes used by shepherds moving flocks between summer pasture at 3,000 metres and winter valleys. Stone cairns and faded paint marks indicate the main paths, but many side canyons remain unmapped. Camel treks operate on the lower slopes, where the terrain flattens into scrubland. The camels are single-humped dromedaries, descendants of caravan stock, their gait slower and more deliberate than the mules used for higher ascents. The experience is ceremonial rather than practical — a fifteen-minute circuit along a red-dirt track — but it satisfies the narrative expectation of mountain travel. The real infrastructure is the network of riads and guesthouses that now line the Imlil road, built to accommodate the sixty thousand annual visitors who use the village as a base for Toubkal attempts or single-day hikes into the adjoining valleys.