SAMAYA X THOMAS DELFINO
DISCOVERING THE LINES OF THE M'GOUN MASSIF
Thomas Delfino set off for the High Atlas in March 2023, with the ambition of having a minimal carbon impact. He tells us about the moments that particularly impressed him: the beauty of the landscapes, the incredible playground represented by the M'Goun massif, and the many enriching encounters with the inhabitants of these valleys and mountains.
"For a while now, I'd been wanting to experience adventures in wild and, if possible, exotic environments, outside my usual setting in the Alps, while going about it as cleanly as possible. My grandmother had given me a book for Christmas about the High Atlas in Morocco and I immediately started imagining landscapes, just with the map in front of me, with the snow of the M'Goun mountain range on one side and the desert on the other. We left France by train, then by ferry to Tangier and another train to Marrakech. This marked the beginning of our adventure.
In the High Atlas, we planned to make a documentary. I was accompanied by Cody Cirillo, Matthew Tufts and Evan Rouillard. We tried to put the spotlight on the fact of descending beautiful faces, while having as low a carbon impact as possible and exchanging with the locals on these environmental issues.
It was really interesting to share our experience up there with the locals, because we saw snowfall as part of our playground, while the locals see it as a real water resource for their agriculture, their herds and their crops.
What particularly impressed me was one of our descents into a village, which was quite ambitious because we didn't really know what we were getting into. On the way up, we came out on a ridge and we didn't know what was behind it. We knew it was more or less passable because there were villages in the other valley, but we knew nothing about the snow conditions. In the end, our first glimpse of the valley opposite was magical, with the snow super-high and the villages super-low. We discovered some really beautiful couloirs going down really low. We got into them, walked around a bit because there were quite a few bars, and finally landed in a village where we had a really nice meeting with some young people. It was a very nice moment, and a good representation of what we'd come for.
