You can now kayak Death Valley National Park. That’s no typo!

Quick, head to Google and type hottest place on the planet.

Follow that up with a quick search for driest place in North America.

Unsurprisingly, the answers will be the exact same place – California’s Death Valley National Park, where it once reached 134 degrees back in 1913 and, at some 282 feet below sea level, it barely receives even 2 inches of rain each year.

2024 has proved to be quite the outlier for Death Valley so far. After a pair of storms dumped nearly 5 combined inches of rain, the barren basins at its depths are no longer lined by the cracked, dry sand you’d usually find there. Instead, they’re completely full of water, and as the park itself noted yesterday, you can now kayak the newly formed lake.

Lake Manly, as they’ve colloquially deemed it, is a roughly 6 mile by 3 mile puddle of salty, silty runoff, but you can splash down your boat in its 1-foot depths and paddle your heart out these days. Rangers estimate it’ll only hold enough water to kayak for the next few weeks before evaporation takes its inevitable toll, but if you’ve got the time (and got the inclination), you’re able to get out on it right now.

When it comes to water events at National Parks, I’d much rather be relaying that the glaciers in Glacier were reforming, but as extraordinary weather events go, this is an entertaining one – even if it’s yet another indication of just how much this world’s climate is changing rapidly.