The Sentier Blanc-Martel

The Blanc-Martel is the great walk of the Verdon: roughly fifteen kilometres of the GR4 along the bottom of the gorge, from the Chalet de la Maline down to the Point Sublime, named after the cave explorers Édouard-Alfred Martel and Isidore Blanc, who forced the canyon at the end of the nineteenth century. It takes most people five to six hours, it is one-way, and it is a full day rather than a photoshoot.

For a session you do not walk it all. Enter from the Point Sublime end, drop through the Couloir Samson, and within twenty minutes you are on the riverbank between walls that close five hundred metres overhead, on beaches of white pebbles with the water an opaque green a metre away. That short stretch gives you everything the whole trail gives — the scale, the light shaft, the pale stone and the colour — without the day.

Inside the canyon the light is indirect for most of the day, which is a gift rather than a problem: soft, cool, no blown highlights, and a strong shaft where the sun clears the rim for an hour or two around the middle of the day. Bring a torch even for a short walk, because the tunnels on the trail are long and genuinely dark.

The river is dam-controlled and the level can rise quickly without warning, so do not settle in on a gravel bar and do not treat the water as predictable. There is a shuttle bus between the two ends in season, and the trail can be closed after rockfall or heavy rain — check the current status and the shuttle timetable before the day.