Paved dips along the Scenic Drive mark where desert washes cross the road. Flash floods can reach them with very little warning, even under a clear sky, and machinery may be needed to reopen the road. Rangers advise against driving here in heavy rain and against entering moving water.
Those dips in the pavement are washes. Less than half an inch of rain in an hour can put a flash flood across this road, because bare rock soaks up nothing. So don't drive it in heavy rain, and if water's running, stop and wait. Six inches of fast water can knock you off your feet. In June of two thousand twenty-two, six people were hoisted out by helicopter and about sixty waited for rangers to clear the way. The biggest monthly rain on record isn't in July. It's October.
Photo: Famartin / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0