When most people think of California’s Death Valley, they think about a place that never rains with sun-bleached cow skulls, heat mirages, and German tourists in rented Mustang convertibles. Death Valley has all those things, but actually, sometimes it does rain there. In fact, it rained there this week, and it rained a whole helluva lot.
How much is a lot? It got a year’s worth of normal rainfall in around three hours. With that much water coming down onto a place with very little ground covering vegetation, you’ll get some mudslides and flooding.
YouTuber SuperfastMatt (aka the guy with the superbike-powered Honda S600 that you saw on Leno’s Garage) found out just how gnarly the roads can get when he tried to go through Death Valley recently to reach the Bonneville Salt Flats (which also got rain, shutting down Speed Week).
During his hours-long drive through a severely damaged Death Valley, Matt managed to rescue a whole bunch of European tourists (seriously, what is it about Europeans and Death Valley, they love it there) by winching them out of the mud, off of rocks and convincing them to turn around rather than cross a flooded road surface.
The footage he captured from his modified 4Runner is incredible and shows just how much work California’s DOT has on its hands to make the tourist destination (and death trap) fit for public consumption once again.
Also, check out Matt’s other non-driving-through-Death-Valley YouTube content. It’s excellent.