The pass that closes without telling anyone

There is no website for this. The Tizi n'Test closes when the gendarmerie at Ijoukak decides it is closed, which is usually a snow morning, occasionally a rockfall, and once, memorably, a lorry that had jackknifed across the narrowest bend and stayed there for three days.

Five of our routes come home over that pass. It is the better road — emptier than the Tichka, and the mosque at Tin Mal halfway down is worth the stop on its own. But the pass sits at 2,100 metres on a single track with no barrier for most of its length, and the difference between open and closed is a decision made by two men at a checkpoint who have no obligation to tell anybody.

“We ring the same four people. Two of them are café owners, one drives a bus, and one is a nurse who crosses it twice a week.”

That is the whole system, and it has not failed in nine years. The nurse is the most reliable — she drives it Tuesday and Friday and will say if the top looks wrong, which is a different and more useful question than whether it is officially shut. A pass can be technically open and still not worth a group in a loaded vehicle.

What we do with a group already moving

Nothing dramatic. The Taroudant night is the decision point: from there the Tichka is four and a half hours and the Test is three, so a closed pass costs ninety minutes and a different set of views, not a day. Every guide carries both versions of the last two days, and neither one requires a phone call to the office to approve.

What we do not do is drive up to look. That was the old method, and it cost a group four hours in 2017 before we admitted it was vanity rather than diligence.

If you are driving it yourself

Ask at the café in Ijoukak, not at the hotel in Marrakech. Go early — the barrier, when it goes across, tends to go across late morning after the first vehicles have reported back. And if you are on one of our self-drive routes, the number in your notes reaches the same four people we ring.