Morocco
Todra Gorge
A river and one walker squeeze through three hundred metres of orange limestone.
The drive out of Tinghir is fifteen kilometres of palm grove and earthen villages, and then the walls arrive. Pink and grey rock closes in on both sides of the road until the sky is a strip, the temperature drops, and every sound you make comes back at you a moment later off the opposite face.
The gorge is a fault in orange limestone, three hundred metres deep, pinching in places to nothing more than the width of the river and a person walking beside it. The tarmac runs right in and then stops at a ford, and beyond that the surface turns to stone. Climbers work the tallest cliff straight off the road, setting out from the hotel and the restaurants at its foot with their own gear. Behind all of it lies the Todgha oasis, a ribbon of green twenty kilometres long and one to two kilometres wide laid across open desert, so heavily tapped by irrigation channels that the river usually never reaches the far end of its own valley.
Solo
Park where the tarmac gives out and walk on. The floor is level, the acoustics do the work, and the further you go past the ford the fewer people there are to hear you testing them.
Couple
Come in the last two hours of light, when the sun leaves the floor but is still on the top third of the wall. The hotel beneath the tallest cliff puts you inside the gorge overnight rather than back in town.
Friends
This is where a group with any climbing between them should stop. The big face rises straight off the road, so nobody has to carry gear anywhere, and the ones not climbing can walk the floor and watch.
- A three-hundred-metre fault splits the orange limestone, narrowing at points to the width of the river and a single walker.
- The tarmac runs into the gorge and ends at a ford, with a stony track carrying on north beyond it.
- Climbers take on the tallest cliff straight from the hotel and restaurants standing at its foot.
- The Todgha oasis behind it runs twenty kilometres through open desert on a strip one to two kilometres wide.
Outoukdim dates, grown only in this valley and recognised by a ministerial geographical indication in 2017.
Amellago and Assoul almonds from villages up the stony road north of the ford, geographically indicated since 2016.
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