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In the late summer of 2023, Death Valley, including the Badwater drainage system, received more rain in a few hours than its average annual rainfall (about 50mm). Because of its extreme aridity, there is no soil in Death Valley, so that the ground surface is covered by loose rock fragments of sizes varying from sand to large boulders. It is also a tectonically active region, a young and growing tectonic depression with strong vertical relief, akin in some ways to the East African Rift Valley, and even more so to the Dead Sea depression in the Middle East.
Because of the lack of soil and sharo relief, on the rare occasions when Death Valley is subject to torrential rainfall massive flash floods occur. If that rainfall is truly extreme, such as it was when the remains of hurricane Hilary hit the area in August of 2023, the consequences, albeit catastrophic in human terms, are spectacular from a geological point of view. The landscape changes in a time scale that is measured in minutes. Stream valleys that may have been dry for years or decades fill up, overflow their banks and become wider and deeper. Vertical-sided gulches form in previously featureless terrain. Alluvial fans grow outwards, encroaching on the mud and salt flats that cover the region’s lowest elevations.
These are the desert playas, in which the rainwater ultimately collects, for Death Valley has no outlet to the ocean. Badwater playa, at the foot of the Funeral Mountains (toponymy in the Death Valley region is decidedly macabre) is the lowest of these playas, with an elevation close t0 100 meters below sea level. It is, in normal times, a flat and blinding expanse of white salt. But for the first time in many decades, the salt flat was transformed by hurricane Hilary into a shallow lake. This ephemeral body of water – it may last a few months, perhaps a year or so – has been named Lake Manly. But I prefer to think of it as the flooded playa, because of its Ballardian overtone.
I took the photographs that open this essay during a stormy winter evening, a few months after the visit of hurricane Hilary. The light of the setting sun filtering through the dark clouds combined with the bright white of the salt flats, and with the almost complete lack of vegetation, to give to the scene an almost sub-arctic quality. It was hard to come to terms with the fact that in just a few months the shallow lake was likely to be gone, and the temperature on the salt flat at noon woukd be among the highest air temperatures routinely recorded on Earth.
The foreboding atmosphere of that evening is, howerver, not commonly encountered in Death Valley. Although it can have dark moods, it may come as a surprise to those who have never visited, and as a bizarre statement to those who have but who are not moved by deserts, that Death Valley can also have a sunny disposition, not only physically but also metaphorically. This side of the region’s personality was on display at the end of a sunny and windless day, when the lake amplified the purple dusk encroaching on the yellows of the western slope of the Funeral Mountains.
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Whether or not the Badwater playa will flood again in my lifetime is an open question. Having been able to witness this rare event was perhaps a privilege, not altogether different from having glimpsed Halley’s comet or witnessed at least one total solar eclipse.