I was revving up the engine of the tiny Hyundai up the inner edge of a sharp hair-pin bend, struggling to time the gear change just right so that I wouldn't lose momentum and stall on the steep ascent. This was my first solo road trip in a foriegn country with chaotic traffic in a car with manual transmission (aka a stick shift), and this location which looked intimidating from the air, was a place where I was pushed to the limits of my driving skills.
I had spotted this sinuous segment of tarmac years ago while scouting Google Earth for strange places on the planet. I had parked this location in my mind, not giving it a second thought until I was planning a trip to the very location, the Dades Gorge. The drive up to it had been fairly smooth, and apart from dealing with the unpredictable traffic, with pedestrians and animals using the road as their personal highway, wasn't too challenging.
But once the vertical walls of the canyon closed in, leaving no room for the road to straddle the fast flowing river, it was forced to climb up the red sandstone to higher grounds. And that was where I found myself on that fateful day. Thankfully, I pulled through, praying that my path downhill wouldn't be so nerve wracking.
When I did reach the top, I turned back to capture the scale of this deep scar on the earths surface, with the tiny remnant of human civilization winding through it.
Dades Gorge
Morocco
Inhospitable Morocco
The winds were relentless and the trail had disappeared into scree, but the views were just endless
I was hiking high above the Dades river valley, deep within the Atlas mountain range, the spine of Morocco. I had started out huffing and puffing in the warm late afternoon sun, but a few hundred feet up, the cold gusts of winds from the snow-capped peaks absorbed all my surface moisture, chilling me to the bone. But the views were just getting better, and that prodded me on.
And finally, the vista of the beautiful Dades river valley finally opened up. Tiny fields lay beside a meandering river, with red brick houses of a small village scattered along the steep slopes of the canyon the river had cut through. In the distance, the river disappeared through a narrow gorge it cut downstream on its way to the Atlantic, while the backdrop of a long line of snow-capped peaks reminded me that winter was not yet over in this high desert.
This is one exposure from that vista point, shot at 1/500s at ISO 800 at F11.
Dades Gorge
Morocco