Find it in the Atlas

Before you settle on your next trekking destination, consider this: How many mountain refuges in the Alps offer rose water to sprinkle on your hands and face after a hard day's hike? (None that I've ever encountered.) If that and other traditional Berber touches — along with some first-rate walking — sounds tempting, then look no further. Morocco's High Atlas range is a stunning destination, and easier to reach than you'd think. From Marrakech, it's a mere 90-minute drive up a winding valley road to the Toubkal National Park. Before you know it, you're sipping mint tea atop a sun-drenched terrace ogling the Djebel Toubkal, North Africa's highest peak at 4,167 m.

Though created in 1942, the Toubkal park remains — charmingly, you could argue — in its infancy when it comes to signposts. Your best bet is to hire a local guide or, if you don't want to deal with logistics, Original Travel's excellent "big short break" arranges transfers and accommodation, www.originaltravel.co.uk. Our trailhead started at tiny Imlil (1,800 m), where the biggest municipal parking lot seemed to be the one reserved for mules. Fortunately, some of the "Berber four-wheel drives," as they're known locally, arrived to ferry up our bags — but we hoofed it to the impressively perched Kasbah du Toubkal.

Built on the ruins of an old fortified home and surrounded by walnut groves, the Kasbah is a beguiling mix of upscale comfort (don't miss the hammam) with social and environmental sensibilities. Spacious rooms come stocked with Berber robes and slippers, but if you need to clean your clothes, the staff — all of whom are employed from surrounding villages — helpfully show you the washbasin and iron. Visitors are encouraged to remember they are "guests of the local inhabitants." Indeed, the Kasbah's quiet, natural setting either makes it, as one visitor wrote in the guest book, "a great place to make babies" or, judging from a po-faced couple we overheard, a breathtaking spot in which to break up.

From Imlil, any number of mule trails lead into the park's rugged inner regions. Some Berber families now offer half-board lodging for as little as $12 a night. But for those looking for a bit more pampering, the Kasbah recently opened a cozy three-guest-room lodge, the first of its kind in the park, where host Omar welcomes hikers with a hearty handshake and a basin of rose water. A simple refuge overlooking a traditional village of flat-topped mud and stone houses, it was a perfect overnight stop on a two-day hike into and out of the Azzaden Valley, where the bracing Atlas air felt like Drano on our clogged city lungs.

Amid a constantly changing landscape, our guide Hossein led us up giant boulder-strewn hillsides and past juniper trees to the 2,500-m Tizi Mezik pass, only to drop sharply down again into a mineral-rich valley of red earth and terraced villages. The next morning — with a night's snowfall caking the red soil and pines — everything looked different again. As we hiked up a final ridge, muleteer Ali Baba (he assured us that was his name) used the opportunity to pelt everybody with snowballs, a prank I hadn't expected to experience in North Africa.

For peak baggers wanting to summit, overnight treks can be arranged up the Djebel Toubkal. On our final day we opted for an easier vista onto a vast mountain desert bowl, before returning to lunch at Samra, a candlelit guest douar (Berber dwelling) run by an energetic Swiss woman and a local female staff. The vegetable tagine and coriander-spiced eggplant was outstanding. Six hours later, I was back in Paris, my boots still spattered with mud, my hands smelling faintly of rose water.