… until Tizi n Telouet: there, all greenery ceases; the burning breath of southern winds denudes the mountain’s rocky skeleton.
Charles de Foucauld’s Reconnaissance au Maroc, 1883–1884

While scanning aerial mapping for new pistes in the High Atlas I came across an intriguing possibility. A seemingly good track lead 24km off the N9 via a village or two to the 2450-m Tizi Telouet pass on the High Atlas watershed (31.3372, -7.2663), a few miles east of the Tichka pass on the N9 trans Atlas. From that point southwards the way ahead was an obliterated mule path, but picked up rideable terrain in just two kilometres, with Telouet town visible nearby. Downhill on a light bike, walking where necessary, it might be doable, no? ‘Who wants to go first?’, I quipped on Twitter.

Once it was mule trains of salt from Telouet’s mines, but today, like the grand old Duke of York and his 10,000 men, a column of pylons marches up and over the col, bringing power from the massive Nour solar plant, 50km away near Ouarzazate.
You’d assume some sort of vehicle crawled up the slopes to erect the pylons, but no service track is evident on the south side. Still, at the very least, riding the switchbacks up to the col for a quick look might be possible. In my experience damage from water run-off gets less severe the higher you go, as the volume, momentum and sludge density all decrease with elevation. The real damage gets done down in the valleys.

I mentioned this recce to a mate who’ll join me out there next week. He soon found some Spanish KTM-ers – a YT channel called Enduro Aventura – who pulled off the Tizi n’Telouet descent (and a whole lot more) in 2002, filmed it all and capped it off with a tracklog on Wikiloc, classified as ‘Very Difficult’.
They call the Tizi Telouet ‘Collado Torretas’ or ‘tower/pylon col’? They confirm ‘the north face has been fixed with a track with a thousand curves and somewhat broken by the rain‘ but continue… ‘the south face on the way to Telouet is a narrow and broken trail with a lot of stones… This hill [trail] seems to be disappearing…‘. They speculate that a new road might get put in as the truncated northside track suggests, but I’ve found tracks or roads often come to a dead halt at provincial boundaries, which this watershed is. The col was just an efficient, ‘as-the-crow-flies’ route for the power cables from Nour to Marrakech.

Their 80-minute vid below is timed to start at the Collado Torretas stage (covering just a few minutes). It’s soon turns gnarly af (stills above). But scan any other random minute in the vid and you’ll see just what light and lightly-loaded KTMs (including 2T) can achieve off-road in the hands of a fit and determined crew. You’ll be staggered to see what these guys blithely attempt. Chapeau to Enduro Aventura I say! The Men who Ride like Goats. Me, I think I’ll take the long way round.