After the first night in a bed since the beginning of the rally  we left Fes around 8am.  There was an easy geo-challenge in the city, then we crossed the Middle Atlas range and headed for more challenging tasks. Michal & Craig wanted to cross the High Atlas in daylight, hence we split. There were some geo-challenges worth twice the normal amount of points along a track that was clearly marked in all my maps. I thought the high number of points was because of the detour we had to take.

At the beginning everything was fine, we saw a beautiful gorge, berber villages. What I did not know is the amount of snow and mud in the mountains. Milos and I got stuck in Baby Beast in deep mud at around 5pm. We managed to move the car some 10m with the help of the sandboards, but had to stop around 7 because of the darkness.

Our hopes that other teams would pass and pull us out of the mud did not materialize, we started to prepare for a long cold night in the car.
Finally at around 8pm two teams, 006 SuperSelect Team and 007 Gumisember came and helped us. At that time I did not know that the next 10km would become the worst driving experience of my life.  The uphill track had a 15° pitch to the right, with a long steep slope on the right.

With the pedal to the metal in low gear 4WD the car was sliding and skidding permanently, often hitting big rocks in the mud and leaving the track.  All people from the three teams were pushing and pulling with ropes, we used all 6 sandboards to pave the track. It was scary, extremely dangerous and we were prepared to lose Baby Beast in the High Atlas.

Thank God we finally managed to get to a tarmac road at 1am. There was still a long distance to cover to the camp, we arrived only at 6am.
Thank you Gumisember and SuperSelect Team for your great help!

I hope you understand that we did not have time to take pictures of the nightly rescue operation.
Here are some pictures of the first part of the day:

What you can’t see on this image, is the damage under the car: I bent one of the bars of the front suspension, there is a big dent in the front diff, and the propeller shaft is slightly bent causing the whole car to vibrate. Baby Beast got massage seats 😉

Today will be a long day at the garage.