8-Day Marrakech to Fes Fossil & Mineral Tour via Alnif & Midelt

We pick you up at your Marrakech riad early in the morning and drive east to Sidi Rahal, in the foothills of the High Atlas, where small mines produce quartz, agate, chalcedony and amethyst. A local miner shows you the workings and how a geode is cracked open to reveal its crystals.

From Ait Ourir you climb to the Tizi n'Tichka pass. Roadside sellers display geodes and quartz points; your guide explains which are natural and which have been coloured. Below the pass, the Ounila Valley, its slopes banded in red, ochre and green clays, leads to Ait Ben Haddou, where you walk up through the ksar to the ruined granary on the summit.

Ouarzazate is your stop for the night, in a kasbah-style hotel. At dinner your guide sets out the plan for the days ahead, from the trilobite beds of Alnif to the mines of Midelt.

Heading south-east from Ouarzazate, you cross the Tizi n'Tinifift and drop into the Draa Valley at Agdz, then follow its palm groves south towards Zagora. All around you are the eroded ridges of the Anti-Atlas, made of seabed sediments from the Palaeozoic era.

At Beni Zoli your guide takes you onto Ordovician shales where large trilobites are found, usually in pieces, and explains why the rocks of this area, including the nearby Fezouata beds, are so important to science.

From there you head east by Tazzarine, stopping at a bed of dark limestone crowded with orthoceras, and reach Alnif in the evening. Before dinner at your guesthouse, there is time to walk along the main street, where workshops display trilobites in every stage of preparation.

A full day in the field around Alnif with a local fossil guide, travelling by 4x4 on tracks into the hills. The morning is spent on the Cambrian sites, the oldest rocks of the trip at more than 500 million years, where large yellowish trilobites such as paradoxidids lie in the shale. You search the loose slabs and see how the diggers follow a single fossil-bearing layer.

After a picnic lunch you move up the time scale to the Ordovician beds of Jbel Tiskaouine, known for calymenid and flexicalymenid trilobites, many of them rolled into a ball as they were when they died. Your guide explains how each layer is dated by the species it contains, and how to tell a real specimen from a composite or a carved fake.

Back in Alnif, you spend the late afternoon in a preparation workshop, watching a trilobite being freed from its stone with fine needles and air abrasion. Dinner and a second night are at your guesthouse.

You set off east from Alnif to Jbel Issoumour, where the Devonian limestone is dotted with family quarries. Walking the spoil heaps with your guide, you search for phacopid trilobites and see how a slab is split to expose a complete animal.

Next comes Latchana, a flat site where spiny trilobites such as Dicranurus have been dug from the Ihandar Formation. The road then reaches the oasis of the Tafilalet at Rissani, near the ruins of Sijilmassa, where you have lunch before driving on to Merzouga.

At the end of the afternoon you mount a camel and ride into the dunes for sunset, arriving at your mid-range luxury desert camp (luxury camp on request) for dinner and a night under the stars.

After watching the sun rise over the dunes, you leave camp by 4x4 for the far south of the Tafilalet. At the old Mifis mine, black hills of manganese and baryte, you search the spoil for crystals.

Near Taouz runs the Kem Kem escarpment, a cliff of red river sediments about 100 million years old and the source of many of the world's Spinosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus teeth. Your local guide takes you past the diggers' tunnels in the bone bed, and you look for fish remains and bone fragments; nearby are prehistoric engravings of animals.

Before heading back, you visit the vanadinite veins of Filon 12 and Filon 13, where miners have followed seams of red crystals, quartz and goethite. You return to Merzouga for dinner and the night at a hotel by the dunes.

Leaving the dunes, you stop in Erfoud to visit a fossil workshop, where black Devonian limestone packed with orthoceras is cut and polished, and to compare the pieces in the showrooms with what you found in the field.

North of Errachidia the road follows the Ziz River through the Ziz Gorges, cutting across the folded Jurassic and Cretaceous limestones of the High Atlas. At the Legionnaires' Tunnel, dug in the 1920s, you can stop to look at the layers bent almost vertical, and at the palm gardens far below.

In the afternoon you climb onto the high plateau and reach Midelt, a mining town at the foot of Jbel Ayachi, one of the highest summits of the High Atlas. You check in to your hotel for two nights.

A day among the minerals. North-east of Midelt, the old lead mines of Mibladen were worked for most of the twentieth century and are known worldwide for vanadinite, bright red hexagonal crystals, along with cerussite and baryte. With a local guide you visit the old workings and the spoil heaps, where small specimens can still be found.

Further on, the road drops into the gorge of the Moulouya to Ahouli, a mining village abandoned when the mines closed, with its empty houses, workshops and galleries cut into the canyon walls.

On the way back you stop at Sidi Ayad, a mining area known for blue azurite, green malachite and fluorite, then visit the mineral dealers of Midelt, whose shops gather specimens from mines across Morocco. Dinner and the night are at your hotel.

Leaving Midelt, you cross the high plain of the Moulouya and climb into the Middle Atlas. Around Timahdite the plateau is dotted with small volcanic cones and dark basalt flows, the youngest rocks of the whole journey, only a few million years old.

Near Azrou you walk in the cedar forest, home of the Barbary macaque, then pass through Ifrane, a mountain town of pitched roofs built in the 1930s.

In the afternoon you descend to Fes and check in to your riad in the medina.

Your private tour ends here in Fes, at the door of your hotel. Should your plans change, we can add a night or drive you to the airport.