The New Yorker:

Lake Manly forms in Badwater Basin only after especially heavy rains. Paddlers grab their paddles and go.

By Meg Bernhard

Manly is an ancient pluvial lake in Death Valley National Park which only sometimes exists. It forms intermittently in Badwater Basin, North America’s lowest point, following periods of heavy rain. After August’s Hurricane Hilary, the lake was suddenly there. A more recent deluge caused it to swell to six miles long and a foot deep, across America’s driest place.

At 4:45 a.m. on a Saturday, Patrick Donnelly loaded six inflatable kayaks into his truck and drove from Shoshone, California, to the park. The moon, a waxing gibbous, shimmered through clouds onto the salt flats. Donnelly is a conservation biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity. His days normally involve composing rants against mineral companies and writing endangered-species petitions for rare flowers and fish. (He has said that “a well written Endangered Species Act petition should bring the reader to tears.”) “I’m not much of a boater, and here I am leading an armada,” he said. He’d bought the kayaks a week earlier and had been out on the lake three times since. “People should know magic still exists.”

Donnelly met a small group of boaters on Manly’s shore just before sunrise: Laura Crane, a conservationist from Joshua Tree; her partner, Paul Bessire, who worked at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; and Dex Lim, a geology student from Las Vegas. The group ogled the glassy expanse of water and the snowcapped mountains beyond, and then got to inflating the kayaks, which slowly wheezed to life. “You have to be gentle,” Donnelly said. He wore a white cowboy hat, cargo pants, and hiking boots that were stiff with salt and mud. He advised that closed-toe shoes were preferable—the lake’s salt-crusted banks could slice up feet. “You absolutely cannot drink,” he said, meaning the lake water; Manly is several times saltier than the ocean. “I’m printing T-shirts,” he said. “The Lake Manly Yacht Club.”

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