Death Valley Flooding 2022: Trying to Tame Furnace Creek Wash

August 6, 2022

Furnace Creek Inn sits at the mouth of Furnace Creek Wash, which curves sharply upon approach. The parking lot and other infrastructure sit squarely in the path of floodwaters.

Furnace Creek Inn (or whatever it’s called these days) was built nearly 100 years ago at the mouth of Furnace Creek Wash, at the apex of the huge Furnace Creek alluvial fan. Although the main facilities lie comfortably above the level of the wash, the parking lot and other infrastructure, including at one time a gas station, were built on the normally dry wash bed.

I visited the area and took pictures in March 2022 in preparation for a talk given later that month by Art Sylvester at the Geological Society of America Meeting in Las Vegas. The talk was about the effects of an artificial diversion of Furnace Creek, made 80 years earlier with a bulldozer and a little bit of dynamite, upstream at Gower Gulch. The diversion was intended to protect the Inn and other structures at the mouth of the wash from floods, but it failed miserably and introduced a number of other problems upstream near Zabriskie Point.

Dropping down Furnace Creek Wash toward the Inn, motorists are advised to slow down to make the sharp left turn. The wash makes a similar sharp turn, but floodwaters and debris flows ignore the sign and only turn once they run into stuff on the right side.

The monsoonal floods of August 2022 showed how ineffective the diversion was. As of today (6 Aug 2022) reports of damage are sketchy, but I did see a photo of 50 or more vehicles in the Inn’s parking lot buried to their axles by debris flows that coursed down the wash.

A low bulldozed berm built to protect housing and parking at the Furnace Creek Inn had already been partially chewed into in March. The recent floods likely overran and washed away this berm, because cars in the parking lot behind it were partially buried by flood debris.

For a thorough discussion of the effects of the diversion at Gower Gulch, see Geology Underfoot in Death Valley and Eastern California. More about that later, and I hope to see the effects of the recent floods myself in September.