In February 2024 I paddled an inflatable kayak across roughly four miles of water in the middle of Badwater Basin. The water was a foot deep at the center and ankle-shallow at the edges.
By March 4 the National Park Service had pulled the kayaking allowance, and as of the May 7, 2026 NPS conditions page that prohibition has not been rescinded. Lake Manly came back in November 2025 after Death Valley caught 1.76 inches of rain in a single month, breaking a precipitation record that had stood since 1923. This reformation never reached kayakable depth.
What follows is a closure-aware guide to a lake that keeps returning on an accelerating cadence, along with the first-person trip report from inside that two-week 2024 window.
Table of Contents
- Key Takeaways
- What Is Lake Manly?
- The 2026 Lake: Current Status
- Getting to the Lake
- What Kayaking Lake Manly Was Actually Like (February 2024)
- Hurricane Hilary and the August 2023 Lake
- The Atmospheric River Window: February 4-7, 2024
- The Closure: Why NPS Pulled Boating
- Lake Manly’s Reappearance Pattern: Five Events in 21 Years
- The Climate Change Throughline
- Lake Manly in the Pleistocene: The Real “Once Per 100,000 Years”
- The Pupfish Surprise
- William Lewis Manly and the Lake’s Name
- Timbisha Shoshone Country
- Practical Visit Information (2026)
- Where to Stay
- What to Bring
- The Bloom That Comes with the Lake
- Frequently Asked Questions
- What is Lake Manly?
- Where is Lake Manly located?
- When does Lake Manly reappear in Death Valley?
- Can you kayak or paddleboard Lake Manly in 2026?
- How deep is Lake Manly?
- How did Lake Manly form historically?
- What caused the 2023-2024 reappearance?
- What caused the 2025-2026 reappearance?
- How long does Lake Manly stay before evaporating?
- What’s the best time to visit Lake Manly?
- Are there fish in Lake Manly?
- How was Lake Manly named?
- Article Updates
Key Takeaways
- Boating is prohibited. NPS pulled the kayaking allowance on March 4, 2024 and has not rescinded it as of May 7, 2026. Footprints and boat-drag scars in the salt persist for years.
- Last year’s reformation never reached kayakable size. November 2025 brought 1.76 inches of rain, broke a 1923 record, and reformed a shallow southern-basin lake visible on NASA Landsat 8 imagery from November 7 and December 1, 2025.
- An entirely different storm sequence triggered the 2024 lake. Hurricane Hilary delivered 2.2 inches in 24 hours on August 20, 2023, followed by a 1.5-inch atmospheric river on February 4-7, 2024. Combined six-month rainfall of 4.9 inches was more than two times Death Valley’s annual average.
- Five reappearances in 21 years. Lake Manly has formed in 2005, 2015, 2019, 2023-2024, and 2025-2026. Older “once a century” framing in news coverage is wrong.
- Climate change is the throughline. Death Valley has logged four record-setting precipitation events in 39 months. UCLA atmospheric scientist Daniel Swain estimates atmospheric rivers now carry 5 to 15 percent more water than in a pre-warming climate.
- Badwater Road is open in 2026. Most flood-recovery roads remain closed (Bonnie Clare, Scotty’s Castle, Lower Wildrose, Darwin Falls), but the main Furnace Creek to Badwater corridor is accessible with caution for loose gravel and soft shoulders.
- Death Valley is cashless. Since 2023, the park only accepts debit, credit, or digital payment for entrance and campground fees. Standard private vehicle pass is $30 for 7 days.
- Modern Lake Manly is not a Pleistocene analogue. Blackwelder-stand Lake Manly was 1,600 square kilometers and 600 feet deep, 185,000 to 128,000 years ago. Modern reappearances peak at 7 by 4 miles and 2 feet deep. Same name, different phenomenon.
What Is Lake Manly?
Lake Manly is the name geologists give to any ephemeral body of water that forms in Death Valley’s Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level at the lowest point in North America.
Its Pleistocene ancestor filled the valley with 1,600 square kilometers of water at a maximum depth near 600 feet roughly 185,000 to 128,000 years ago. Modern reappearances are much smaller and far shallower, but they share a name and a basin. The 2023-2024 lake reached 7 miles long, 4 miles wide, and 2 feet deep at peak before evaporation and a wind event reduced it to scattered pools.
Reappearances happen when atmospheric rivers, tropical cyclone remnants, or anomalously wet fall storms drop enough rainfall to overwhelm Death Valley’s evaporation rate and pool water in the lowest part of the basin. Rain alone is not the trigger. Amargosa River, ordinarily a subterranean trickle, has to flow on the surface and deliver runoff from a 9,000-square-mile drainage basin into Badwater. That happens rarely under normal climate conditions and is happening more often under the current one.
The 2026 Lake: Current Status
As of May 7, 2026, when NPS last updated its Alerts and Conditions page, there is no formal mention of Lake Manly on the current Death Valley conditions report. Whatever lake formed by the November 2025 atmospheric river is, by every public indication, evaporated or reduced to scattered pools. NASA Landsat 8 captured the southern-basin water on December 1, 2025, comparing it against a dry November 7, 2025 baseline. That reformation lobe was much smaller than the 2024 lake and never deep enough to support boating.
If you arrive at the Badwater Basin parking lot in 2026 expecting to see a shimmering inland sea, you will find what you would find in any normal year: a salt crust with a small spring-fed pool near the boardwalk and a long white plain stretching west toward the Panamint Range. Wet or muddy patches may persist for weeks after rain events, but the kayak-on-the-lowest-point-of-North-America moment is, for now, a 2024 phenomenon.
Most park roads are open. Badwater Road from Furnace Creek south to the basin parking lot is accessible with caution for “loose gravel, soft shoulders, unpaved sections.” Bonnie Clare Road and Scotty’s Castle Road remain closed for flood recovery (no pedestrian access).
Lower Wildrose Road and Darwin Falls Road are expected to remain closed through summer 2027 because Darwin Falls Road is, in NPS language, “completely gone in many places.” Hunter Mountain Road is closed for muddy conditions. Titus Canyon Road is temporarily open after repairs but is scheduled for a long closure from October 1, 2026 through September 30, 2027.
Verify the current conditions at nps.gov/deva before your trip.
Getting to the Lake
Badwater Basin sits 17 miles (27 km) south of Furnace Creek on Badwater Road, about a 30-minute drive on a paved two-lane. The parking lot is large enough for RVs and tour buses. A vault toilet sits at the trailhead. From the lot, an ADA-accessible boardwalk drops you onto the salt flat, and a wide compacted-salt walking surface continues west for the full recommended 1.5 to 2 mile out-and-back.
Google Maps: Trailhead and Parking Lot
Round Trip Length: 1.5 to 2 miles to the salt-polygon viewing zone. To reach any 2025-2026 lake water from the lot, expect to walk several hundred yards to a mile depending on lake position.
Round Trip Time: 40 to 60 minutes
Difficulty: Easy
Elevation Gain: Flat
Trail Type: Boardwalk, then compacted-salt route, out and back
Location: Badwater Road, 30 minutes (17 miles/27km) south of Furnace Creek
Parking: Paved parking lot with large spaces for RVs and buses
Restroom: Vault toilet located in parking lot
Summer advisory: NPS does not recommend hiking after 10 a.m. between May and September. Surface temperatures on the salt flat can exceed 150°F.
Pets are not allowed on any trail in Death Valley National Park, even if carried. Do not leave your animal in your vehicle. Ask at the Furnace Creek Visitor Center about dirt roads where walking a pet is permitted.
What Kayaking Lake Manly Was Actually Like (February 2024)
To be completely transparent up front: I paddled this lake in February 2024 during a two-week window the NPS officially authorized. That window closed on March 4, 2024.
As of May 2026, boating Lake Manly is prohibited, and the prohibition is not just a technicality. Footprints and boat-drag scars in the salt crust persist for years until the next lake-forming event re-floods the area. The footprints from February 2024 are, by NPS observation, still visible.
I will tell you what the kayaking experience was like because that is the article you came to read. I will not pretend you can repeat it in 2026.
We drove out to Badwater Basin in mid-February. Lake Manly was 6 miles long, 3 miles wide, and about a foot deep at the middle, per the NPS press release timed to that window. From the parking lot, the water edge was a few hundred feet of compacted salt away. Boardwalk ended; salt walk began; a vinyl-and-rubber inflatable kayak in a stuff sack weighs about 35 pounds and felt like every bit of it on that walk.
Water was the color of weak tea over white salt. When we launched, the bottom shimmered through it.
Our boat sat unusually high. Salt water at this concentration is denser than fresh water, and an inflatable rides higher in dense water than in dilute. That extra inch of freeboard turned out to matter. Shallow enough that any rigid hull would have scraped salt on the bottom, but we never did.
Paddles never fully submerged. Half the stroke was a swing through air. Half was a drag through salt slurry. We learned to feather the blade differently.
Wind matters more than depth on a lake like this. Calm conditions produced glassy reflections of the Panamint Range. A 10-mph breeze churned the water into a brown chop that cut visibility in the salt to maybe 6 inches. We ran into that the second afternoon and called it quits early.
Sunrise was the time to be on the water.
Mornings were cold, low 40s, with a layer of mist that the rising sun burned off in 20 minutes. Light moves through pink and lavender into a hard desert white by 8 a.m., and reflections on glassy water are what every photographer at the lake was after.
Bring a jacket and layer it under a windbreaker. Even when the air is calm at sunrise, paddling generates its own apparent wind chill.
Then there is the salt and the mud.
Salt water at Badwater concentrations is mildly hygroscopic, which means it keeps pulling moisture out of fabric long after you think it has dried. Sodium chloride crystals re-precipitate inside zipper teeth, neoprene weaves, and any rubber gasket on a drysuit.
Mud at the lake edge is a saline clay slurry. When it dries on a kayak hull or a paddleboard deck pad, it sets like a thin coat of cement. Open-cell sandal foam absorbs the slurry and stays gritty for the life of the sandal.
You will come back from the water salty to the elbows. Bring a full change of clothes, multiple towels, contractor bags for the dirty gear, and at least three gallons of fresh water for an immediate rinse before anything goes in the car. Without that rinse, salt will keep working on your gear in the trunk for the next 200 miles of driving. With it, the kayak survived. The drybag clip rusted anyway. The paddle shafts cleaned up fine.
Barefoot is a bad idea. Salt crystals along the lake edge are sharp. Open sandals slip and let crystals work between the foot and the foam. Closed-toe water shoes or old running shoes are the right call. After the trip, the shoes will be ruined. That is a one-trip footwear category for this destination.
One group I saw was attempting a rigid canoe. They had walked it out a long way to find water deep enough to launch, then paddled maybe a few hundred yards before the bottom started catching on the hull. Inflatable boats won this lake. Tandems, packrafts, and paddleboards floated where canoes scraped. A standup paddleboard is workable on calm mornings if you can accept a layer of brown silt on your deck pad.
What I used in February 2024: Advanced Elements AirVolution Inflatable Kayak (drop-stitch floor, ~26-pound tandem). Drop-stitch hulls hold a stiffer profile in shallow water than a typical inflatable, which mattered for tracking. I paired it with a red-light headlamp for pre-dawn launches and a five-gallon collapsible water jug for the gear rinse at the parking lot.
This is not the kind of trip you want to camp comfortably after. Plan to drive to a hotel with a shower and a paved parking lot, ideally something within an hour. I will get to lodging below.
Companion piece: the technique-focused trip report lives at Kayaking Death Valley National Park. That spoke covers launch points, wind windows, paddle selection, and the specific 2024 routing I followed.
Hurricane Hilary and the August 2023 Lake
That 2024 kayaking window was a second act. Hurricane Hilary in August 2023 was the first act.
Hilary made landfall in northern Mexico as a Category 1 hurricane and weakened to tropical-storm status as it crossed Baja California. Remnant moisture reached Death Valley with extraordinary force.
On Sunday August 20, 2023, Furnace Creek caught two distinct rainfall bursts: roughly one inch in the morning and another inch overnight. That 24-hour total of 2.2 inches is the all-time daily record at Furnace Creek, beating a 1.7-inch record set on August 5, 2022.
Park closed. About 400 residents, travelers, and employees sheltered in place at Furnace Creek, Stovepipe Wells, and Panamint Springs until roads became passable. CA-190 between Zabriskie Point and Furnace Creek sustained pavement loss and undercutting. Most paved roads reopened by October 15, 2023, but some backcountry routes are still closed three years later.
Lake Manly itself formed within hours of the rainfall. At peak it reached 7 miles long, 4 miles wide, and 2 feet deep, captured by Landsat 9 on August 22, 2023. By November 2, 2023 the same sensor recorded the lake at roughly 2 by 4 miles, only a couple inches deep.
Park Ranger Abby Wines told the NPS press team in February 2024: “Most of us thought the lake would be gone by October. We were shocked to see it still here after almost six months.”
That August lake was kayakable, but the park was closed for road repair and almost no visitors saw it. Most of the kayaking that ended up in news coverage was the February 2024 reformation.
The Atmospheric River Window: February 4-7, 2024
Then a Pacific atmospheric river anchored over Southern California from February 4 through 7, 2024. Furnace Creek caught 1.5 additional inches over those four days. Snow fell to 4,000 feet, sealing the Panamint and Funeral ranges with a white crown above the brown desert below.
CA-190 closed temporarily after flash flooding on February 6 and reopened mid-morning February 7. Badwater Road reopened by late afternoon on the 7th. Dantes View, Artists Drive, Devils Golf Course, Mustard Canyon, and Twenty Mule Team Canyon side roads stayed closed for days longer.
By the time NPS issued its February 16, 2024 press release titled “Rare opportunity to kayak in Death Valley National Park,” cumulative rainfall over the previous six months had hit 4.9 inches, more than twice Death Valley’s 2.15-inch annual average. Lake Manly was 6 miles long, 3 miles wide, and a foot deep. NPS noted that in normal years when the basin briefly floods after a storm, water is “only a couple inches deep.” This was an order of magnitude deeper than the typical post-storm puddle.
NASA confirmed the depth from orbit.
Surface Water and Ocean Topography satellite (SWOT), launched in December 2022, observed Lake Manly between February 2 and March 4, 2024 at 100-meter resolution using a Ka-band radar interferometer. Researchers cross-referenced surface elevations against USGS land-elevation data and measured lake depths “from about 3 feet (1 meter) to less than 1.5 feet (0.5 meters)” across the six-week window.
NASA freshwater science lead Tamlin Pavelsky described it dryly: “This is a really cool example of how SWOT can track how unique lake systems work.”
The Closure: Why NPS Pulled Boating
Sustained 40-mph winds blew Lake Manly approximately two miles north between February 29 and March 2, 2024. Lake Manly spread out, got shallower, and pulled back from the original launch zones near the boardwalk.
February 28, 2024 was the last day kayaks could be launched from a roadside location.
On March 4, NPS issued the boating prohibition: “Due to the changed conditions, the National Park Service no longer allows people to attempt to boat on Lake Manly.”
Operationally, the reason is salt-mud scarring. Walking a kayak across virgin salt-mud to a new launch zone leaves footprints and drag lines that, in NPS language, “remain visible for many years until the lake forms again.”
This is not a temporary closure pending equipment upgrades. That prohibition exists because the salt flat is a Leave-No-Trace zone, and a wet salt crust records every step a visitor takes on it until the next flood resets the surface.
Last winter’s lake was never large enough or deep enough to reopen the question. NASA Landsat 8 imaged a small southern-basin lobe on December 1, 2025. NPS used the word “shallow” in its December 4, 2025 press release without providing dimensions. There has been no follow-up NPS communication authorizing visitor kayaking on the new lake. Boating prohibition issued for the 2024 lake remains the operative policy.
Lake Manly’s Reappearance Pattern: Five Events in 21 Years
The original article framing on Lake Manly, drawn from news coverage of the 2024 event, called it a “once in a century” or “once in a lifetime” rarity. The record does not support that. NASA Earth Observatory documents five reappearances at meaningful (sub-mile to multi-mile) scale in the last 21 years.
February 2005 brought Lake Manly back during a mild El Niño winter when Death Valley caught roughly 6 inches of rain across the wet season, about 4 times the 1.5-inch average for the period.
Landsat 5 captured Lake Badwater (an earlier NASA name for the same phenomenon) on February 9, 2005, showing a large pool of greenish water stretched across the valley floor. By February 15, 2007 the same sensor recorded a fully restored salt-coated playa.
It persisted in some form for about three months. Severe flooding in March 2005 broke precipitation records dating to 1911.
October 18, 2015 brought the Grapevine Canyon flash flood that destroyed Scotty’s Castle. A year’s worth of rainfall, 2.75 inches, fell in five hours.
That flash flood roared toward Scotty’s Castle at an estimated 3,200 cubic feet per second, filled the historic Garage with four feet of mud, destroyed the water system, and downed 23 power poles and a mile of concrete fence posts. Total repair cost reached approximately $66 million. Scotty’s Castle remained closed to the public as of May 2026.
Badwater Basin formed a lake during that same storm, modest in size and short-lived.
2019 gets a single line in NASA’s framing alongside 2005 and 2015. No detailed dimensional documentation exists for that event. It is the smallest of the five reappearances in this 21-year record.
Standout of the modern record is the 2023-2024 lake. Six months of persistence, ~7 by 4 miles at peak, two feet deep at peak, kayakable for several weeks. NPS communication, NASA satellite documentation, and visitor coverage on that one were exhaustive.
Last fall’s lake is smaller, consistent with November 2025’s 1.76 inches of rainfall (versus August 2023’s 2.2 inches plus the compounding 1.5-inch February atmospheric river). It is the second event in 24 months, and that gap is the headline number.
Five events in 21 years works out to a reappearance roughly every four to five years. Smaller post-storm puddles in the basin form, in NASA’s framing, “every few years.” A “true” Pleistocene-scale lake like the Blackwelder stand has not been seen since the late Wisconsin glaciation. But a modern, multi-mile, multi-foot-deep ephemeral version is becoming common rather than rare.
The Climate Change Throughline
The 2022 Furnace Creek event was officially classified as a “1,000-year event” by NWS Las Vegas meteorologist Daniel Berc. “The heavy rain that caused the devastating flooding at Death Valley was an extremely rare, 1,000-year event,” he said in NPS’s August 2022 press release. A 1,000-year event has a 0.1 percent annual probability under stationary-climate statistics.
August 2023’s Hurricane Hilary delivery of 2.2 inches in 24 hours broke a Furnace Creek single-day record that itself had been set only a year earlier in 2022. February 2024’s atmospheric river compounded into a six-month total of 4.9 inches, more than twice Death Valley’s average annual rainfall.
Fall 2025 caught 2.41 inches over September through November and broke the November monthly record that had stood since 1923.
Four record-setting precipitation events in 39 months. Stationary-climate 1,000-year-event framing has lost its meaning for this basin.
UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain has estimated that atmospheric rivers carry “5 to 15 percent more precipitation now than they would have in a world untouched by climate change.” UCLA’s atmospheric-river research, including Alex Hall’s group projections, point to “a more than threefold increase in sub-seasonal events comparable to California’s Great Flood of 1862” under continued greenhouse gas forcing. Character of precipitation is shifting toward “more intense atmospheric rivers and longer dry spells between them.” Exactly the pattern Death Valley has lived since 2022.
Death Valley Park Superintendent Mike Reynolds said it plainly in the 2022 NPS release: “Death Valley is an incredible place of extremes. With climate change models predicting more frequent and more intense storms, this is a place where you can see climate change in action!”
For Lake Manly specifically, the implication is that the historical “every few years” framing is shifting toward “more frequent reappearances of moderate size, with occasional much larger reappearances.”
Modern Lake Manly will not approach the 1,600-square-kilometer Blackwelder stand under any plausible climate trajectory. That required perennial Pleistocene rainfall over a 65,806-square-kilometer watershed and a broadly wetter climate.
But the Holocene-scale lake (the kind documented at minus-79 to minus-73 meter elevation, 5,000 to 2,000 years ago, “larger than Lake Mead, persisting under 100 years”) becomes more plausible as a future scenario, not less, under the climate trajectory.
Lake Manly in the Pleistocene: The Real “Once Per 100,000 Years”
Geologist Eliot Blackwelder first mapped Death Valley’s ancient shorelines in his 1933 paper, which gave the lake its scientific name. Blackwelder-stand Lake Manly was the deepest documented body of water that ever occupied this basin.
Maximum surface area: approximately 1,600 square kilometers (620 square miles). Maximum length: roughly 90 miles. Width: 6 to 11 miles. Shoreline length: about 320 kilometers (200 miles).
Maximum depth at the highstand: 595 to 605 feet per Blackwelder’s original measurement, though Ku et al. (1998) revised that range upward to 175 to 335 meters once tectonic deformation was factored in.
Timing of the Blackwelder stand: 185,000 to 128,000 years ago, with infrared-stimulated luminescence dating of feldspar from highstand beach sand returning ages of approximately 185 plus-or-minus 21 thousand years. That places the lake squarely in Marine Isotope Stage 6, the penultimate glacial period.
Lowenstein et al. (2024) refined the duration of the highstand to about 70,000 years, with final desiccation about 127,100 plus-or-minus 4,300 years ago. Shoreline elevations during the Blackwelder stand: 47 to 90 meters (154 to 295 feet) above modern sea level, with the primary shoreline at roughly 300 feet (90 m) elevation.
Tectonic deformation has complicated the shoreline record over the intervening 120,000+ years.
Frankel and others have measured the Northern Death Valley fault zone slip rate at 4.2 to 4.7 millimeters per year using cosmogenic beryllium-10 and chlorine-36 dating on offset alluvial fans. Over 60,000 to 70,000 years that adds up to 280 to 330 meters of horizontal displacement, with associated vertical components affecting where ancient shorelines now sit.
Along the eastern Badwater margin, the Black Mountains fault is a normal fault with active Holocene movement and continues to drop the basin floor today.
A second, smaller lake formed during the Wisconsin glaciation roughly 35,000 to 10,000 years ago, with three named highstand episodes (DVLP-1 around 26,000 years ago, DVLP-2 around 18,000 years ago, DVLP-3 around 12,000 years ago). Depths during the Wisconsin stage were 64 to 78 meters per Ku et al., far smaller than Blackwelder. By 12,970 plus-or-minus 185 years ago Lake Manly had largely receded, and it was completely dry by 10,000 years ago.
A Holocene minor lake formed between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago at minus-79 to minus-73 meter elevation. Grasso (1996) documented its extent: larger than Lake Mead, persisting under 100 years total. This is the geologically recent ancestor of the modern reappearances. Same scale and trigger pattern. Our 2024 lake was a brief reprise of a phenomenon that has been a normal part of this basin’s late-Holocene history.
Three rivers contributed to historical Lake Manly stands.
Amargosa River (the same one NPS Ranger Matthew Lamar described as “really flowing” into the basin in February 2024) was the principal modern feed. Knott et al. (2008) bracket its arrival at Death Valley between 140,000 and 18,000 years ago.
Mojave River contributed intermittently from about 18,000 years ago and possibly continued overflowing until 8,000 years ago. Owens River fed the system during the Tahoe glaciation after sequentially filling Owens Lake, China Lake, Searles Lake, and Panamint Valley.
Total Lake Manly catchment area is 65,806 square kilometers (25,408 square miles), and runoff at the time of the Blackwelder stand was at least 3.5 times today’s volume.
Salinity at the highstand was under 10,000 parts per million, sometimes under 3,000 ppm. Fresh enough to drink, fresh enough to support a vertebrate ecosystem.
Salt accumulation during dry intervals between stands proceeded at approximately 1.7 millimeters per year, gradually building the 11,000-foot sediment pile beneath modern Badwater. Salt is predominantly sodium chloride with calcite, gypsum, and borax as secondary evaporite minerals.
Hexagonal salt polygons visible on every Badwater photo result from repeated wet-dry cycles, with water dissolving the upper salt and re-precipitating new crystals that push the surface up into chaotic ridges.
The Pupfish Surprise
Older popular sources said Lake Manly’s pupfish divergence happened millions of years ago, with the various Death Valley species sealed off in separate basins after the Blackwelder lake desiccated.
Martin and others published a genomic study in 2016 (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 283:20152334) that revised that timeline drastically. Stem divergence of all five modern Death Valley pupfish species traces back roughly 10,000 years (95 percent confidence interval: 5,000 to 20,000 years).
Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) colonized its single 93-degree cavern between 105 and 830 years ago, not millions.
Implication for the lake history is striking. Pupfish were not held in Death Valley through 130,000 years of MIS-6 lake-then-desert cycling. They radiated into isolated springs in the post-Wisconsin Holocene with frequent overland dispersal events. This lineage is geologically recent, despite some of the smallest natural species ranges on Earth.
Five pupfish species inhabit Death Valley today: Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis), Salt Creek pupfish (C. salinus salinus), Cottonball Marsh pupfish (C. salinus milleri), Amargosa River pupfish (C. nevadensis amargosae), and Saratoga Springs pupfish (C. nevadensis nevadensis). None live in the modern reformations of Lake Manly. That 2024 lake was too salty (salinity higher than seawater at peak concentration) and too short-lived to support fish. Last year’s reformation is even shallower. Pupfish stay in the springs.
William Lewis Manly and the Lake’s Name
The name “Lake Manly” was coined in 1932, though it was used in the geological literature from that point forward without formal adoption by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. An earlier 1902 publication referred to the same feature as “Death Valley Lake.” “Lake Rogers” was a competing name in some early sources, honoring Manly’s compatriot John Haney Rogers. An older misspelling, “Manley,” appears frequently in popular writing but is incorrect.
William Lewis Manly (1820-1903) was a member of the Bennett-Arcan wagon party of the Lost Forty-Niners. That party split off from a larger immigrant group that had left Salt Lake City in October 1849, attempting a cutoff route to the California settlements. By December 1849 the Bennett-Arcan group was trapped in Death Valley with starving oxen, failing wagons, and the Panamint Range walling them off from rescue.
Manly and Rogers volunteered to walk out for help. They reached Mission San Fernando, secured horses and provisions, and returned to find the Bennett and Arcan families still surviving after roughly a month of waiting.
On February 11, 1850, the rescued party finally set out west. As they crested the Panamints, one member reportedly looked back and said “Goodbye, Death Valley,” giving the place its lasting name. They reached Rancho San Francisco on March 7, 1850.
Three Death Valley features carry Manly’s name today: Manly Beacon near Zabriskie Point, Manly Peak south of the valley, and Lake Manly itself. Manly’s account, “Death Valley in ’49,” was first published in 1894 and remains in print.
Timbisha Shoshone Country
The Timbisha Shoshone, the Native nation whose homeland is Death Valley, had occupied the valley for over a thousand years before the Bennett-Arcan party stumbled in. “Timbisha” means “rock paint,” referring to red ochre that was used in ceremonial face painting from sources within the valley. Timbisha relied on piñon pine nuts, mesquite pods, and seasonal movement between valley bottom and mountain pinyon belts. Euro-American contact during the 1849 Gold Rush, and subsequent borax mining starting in the 1880s, displaced Timbisha access to traditional water sources and ceremonial sites.
Federal recognition of the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe came in 1983. Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act of 2000 returned 7,500 acres of ancestral homelands to the Tribe, the first time the federal government had restored land to a tribe inside a national park boundary. Approximately 50 of the Tribe’s 300 members live at the Death Valley Indian Community at Furnace Creek.
Any history of the lake’s “discovery” or “naming” should acknowledge that the Timbisha had names for these waters and for these places long before Manly walked through.
The valley is not the Manly party’s. The Manly party’s name is on it.
Practical Visit Information (2026)
Entrance fees: Standard private vehicle pass $30 (7 days), motorcycle $25, per-person (foot or bicycle, 16 and older) $15, Death Valley annual pass $55, America the Beautiful interagency annual pass $80.
Free passes are available for active military, seniors 62 and older, persons with disabilities, and fourth graders. Children under 16 entering on foot or bicycle do not need a pass.
Death Valley is cashless-only as of 2023 (the policy began April 8 and applies to entrance and campground fees). Bring a card or use a digital wallet, or buy a pass in advance through recreation.gov.
Summer access advisory: NPS does not advise hiking after 10 a.m. between May and September. Ambient temperatures regularly exceed 120°F, and the salt flat reflects heat back at the visitor. Pre-dawn or evening visits are the only sustainable summer options. Bring more water than you think you need, and a wide-brim sun hat. The Badwater Basin parking lot has no shade.
Cellular signal is slow and limited inside the park. T-Mobile and AT&T are marginal at The Ranch and Stovepipe Wells Village. Verizon is slightly better in those zones. Expect no signal at Badwater itself. Some lodges and restaurants offer paid Wi-Fi.
Pet policy: Pets are not allowed on any trail. Period. Even if carried. Speak with a ranger about dirt roads where walking a pet is permitted. Do not leave an animal in your vehicle.
Lake-edge etiquette: Walk on already-compacted surfaces leading west from the Badwater parking lot. Do not blaze new trails through virgin salt. NPS framing on this is direct: “Footsteps or boat drag lines left in the salt flat will remain visible for many years until the lake forms again.” This is the operational reason the boating prohibition exists, and it applies to walking too. Boardwalk and existing wide compacted-salt corridor handle the vast majority of visitor traffic.
Where to Stay
About 30 hotels, motels, and campgrounds sit within an hour of Badwater Basin. Most are east and southeast of the park. I always use Booking to reserve. These are my top picks:
The Inn at Death Valley and Ranch at Death Valley are about 20 minutes from Lake Manly. These two properties are my first choices, though they are the most expensive option inside the park.
The Inn carries five-star resort status. Its sister property, The Ranch, is more of a higher-end motel, with the largest General Store in the park and a family atmosphere.
The Inn offers exclusivity; its mineral water pool is enjoyable but often busy with family gatherings. Casitas at the Inn require a lengthy uphill walk from the main lobby and dining area. For easier access, enter through the ground floor beneath the main lobby and take the elevator to the second floor.
Rooms at The Inn with west-facing views give breathtaking sunset vistas over the Panamint and Cottonwood Mountains. Next to the main lobby, a charming library houses a collection of vintage books about Death Valley.
Stovepipe Wells Village Hotel is 50 minutes from Badwater, typically $180 to $240 per night in 2026 depending on season.
Longstreet Inn & Casino is about an hour drive on the Nevada border, $100 to $200 per night.
Pahrump is a 90-minute drive each way, with several hotels and dining options. Expect $100 to $400 per night.
Tecopa is another 90-minute option, with a few small inns clustered near natural hot springs. $100 to $200 per night.
NPS campgrounds within an hour: Furnace Creek (only fully reservable in the park, October 15 to April 15, recreation.gov, 18 hookup sites, no EV charging, standard sites approximately $30/night), Sunset (first-come, approximately $18/night), Texas Spring (first-come, approximately $20/night), Stovepipe Wells (first-come), Mesquite Spring (first-come, accessed by paved road farther north).
With recent climate-driven lake formations and super-bloom traffic, reserve Furnace Creek five to six months in advance for prime spring weekends. Walk-up sites at Sunset and Texas Spring fill by early afternoon during peak season. They book up on quiet years and bury you on busy ones.
What to Bring
You will not be kayaking, but Badwater Basin demands a kit. Specific items I have used or that match the standard cluster recommendations for Death Valley work:
- Field guide: Sonoran Desert Wildflowers by Richard Spellenberg (Falcon Guide). Mojave and Sonoran overlap in species; this guide identifies most of what you will see in the cooler months.
- Binoculars: Nikon ACULON A211 10×42. Wide field of view, durable, decent low-light optics for sunrise viewing.
- Sun hat: Home Prefer wide-brim sun hat. UPF 50+, packs flat, vented crown. The Badwater parking lot has zero shade.
- Day pack: Osprey Talon 22L. Holds three liters of water, layers, snacks, and camera. Hydration sleeve compatible.
- Headlamp: Headlamp with red-light mode. Sunrise visits start in dark and red light preserves night vision and does not blow out your eyes when you check a map.
If you are a paddler reading this for the kayak content, the technique-side companion piece at Kayaking Death Valley National Park covers the launch logistics from February 2024 along with a related kit list. Gear lives in the Paddleboard Accessories roundup.
The Bloom That Comes with the Lake
One last thing about the November 2025 storm: it is the same trigger that produced the 2026 Death Valley super bloom.
NPS confirmed 2026 as the park’s fourth officially classified super bloom on the canonical list (1998, 2005, 2016, 2026) when the wildflowers page was updated May 6, 2026. Peak ran from mid-February through about March 17, when record March heat (107°F on March 25, an all-time March mark) and drying winds ended it.
Lake Manly and the bloom share one weather event, one trigger, and one set of climate-change implications.
For the full bloom retrospective with the November 2025 storm trigger, the four-bloom canon, the ten-species field guide with Calflora-verified taxonomy, viewing locations by elevation tier, and the predictive watch list for the next bloom, read the 2026 Death Valley super bloom retrospective field guide. For the California-wide bloom context including this year’s only confirmed super bloom (Carrizo Plain), see the California Super Bloom & Wildflower Guide.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Lake Manly?
Lake Manly is the name geologists give to any ephemeral lake that forms in Death Valley’s Badwater Basin, 282 feet below sea level. Its Pleistocene ancestor was 1,600 square kilometers in area and roughly 600 feet deep at the Blackwelder stand 185,000 to 128,000 years ago. Its modern reappearances are far smaller (up to 7 by 4 miles, 2 feet deep at peak) and short-lived.
Where is Lake Manly located?
Lake Manly forms in Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America (282 feet below sea level), inside Death Valley National Park, California. The basin sits 17 miles south of Furnace Creek on Badwater Road, about a 30-minute drive. The trailhead is a paved parking lot with an ADA-accessible boardwalk leading onto the salt flat.
When does Lake Manly reappear in Death Valley?
Lake Manly has reformed five times in the last 21 years: 2005, 2015, 2019, 2023-2024, and 2025-2026. That works out to roughly once every four to five years. The “once-in-a-century” framing common in news coverage of the 2024 event is not accurate to the modern record. Triggers include El Niño wet winters, tropical-cyclone remnants, and atmospheric rivers.
Can you kayak or paddleboard Lake Manly in 2026?
No. NPS issued a boating prohibition on March 4, 2024 that remains in force as of May 2026. The 2025-2026 lake never reached kayakable depth. The operational reason for the prohibition is that footprints and boat-drag scars in the salt crust persist for years until the lake forms again. Per NPS: “the National Park Service no longer allows people to attempt to boat on Lake Manly.”
How deep is Lake Manly?
The 2023-2024 Lake Manly peaked at 2 feet deep in August 2023 and about 1 foot deep by mid-February 2024. NASA SWOT satellite measurements between February 2 and March 4, 2024 ranged from 3 feet (1 meter) at the deepest to less than 1.5 feet (0.5 meters) at the shallow margins. The 2025-2026 reformation is shallower. The Pleistocene Blackwelder stand reached approximately 600 feet at its highstand.
How did Lake Manly form historically?
Lake Manly’s Pleistocene ancestor formed during cooler glacial periods when increased Sierra Nevada snowmelt and broader regional precipitation fed the Amargosa, Mojave, and Owens river systems into Badwater Basin. The Blackwelder stand of 185,000 to 128,000 years ago aligned with Marine Isotope Stage 6. A smaller Wisconsin-stage lake formed 35,000 to 10,000 years ago. A Holocene minor lake larger than Lake Mead formed between 5,000 and 2,000 years ago.
What caused the 2023-2024 reappearance?
Hurricane Hilary dropped 2.2 inches of rain at Furnace Creek on August 20, 2023 (the all-time daily record). A Pacific atmospheric river added 1.5 inches February 4-7, 2024. The compounded six-month total of 4.9 inches at Furnace Creek was more than twice Death Valley’s 2.15-inch annual average. The Amargosa River drained 9,000 square miles of saturated catchment into the basin.
What caused the 2025-2026 reappearance?
Death Valley caught 1.76 inches of rain in November 2025 (breaking the 1923 November record of 1.70 inches) and 2.41 inches across September through November 2025 (the wettest fall on record). NASA Landsat 8 imaged the resulting Lake Manly reformation on November 7 and December 1, 2025. The 2025 lake was much smaller than the 2024 lake and never reached kayakable depth.
How long does Lake Manly stay before evaporating?
Modern reappearances persist from days to roughly six months. The 2023-2024 lake held water for about six months (August 2023 through early spring 2024) at meaningful depth. The 2005 lake persisted for about three months. The 2015 lake was modest and brief. The Pleistocene Blackwelder stand persisted for about 70,000 years before final desiccation 127,100 years ago.
What’s the best time to visit Lake Manly?
Visit between mid-October and mid-April for tolerable temperatures. Sunrise is the best time of day at the parking lot, both for cooler conditions and for the alpenglow on the Panamint Range. NPS does not advise hiking after 10 a.m. between May and September; summer surface temperatures on the salt flat can exceed 150°F. Lake formation is unpredictable, but the most likely windows follow atmospheric-river or tropical-cyclone-remnant rainfall events.
Are there fish in Lake Manly?
No. Death Valley’s five pupfish species (Devils Hole, Salt Creek, Cottonball Marsh, Amargosa River, Saratoga Springs) live in springs and seasonal creeks, not in Lake Manly. The 2024 lake was too salty (peak concentration higher than seawater) and too short-lived to support fish. Modern Lake Manly reformations evaporate before any aquatic ecosystem can establish.
How was Lake Manly named?
The name “Lake Manly” entered geological literature in 1932. It honors William Lewis Manly (1820-1903), who led the Bennett-Arcan wagon party of the Lost Forty-Niners out of Death Valley in 1850 after a month-long rescue trek to Mission San Fernando. Manly Beacon and Manly Peak share the same honoree. The common misspelling “Manley” is incorrect. Earlier names for the same feature included “Death Valley Lake” (1902) and “Lake Rogers” (after John Haney Rogers, Manly’s compatriot).
Affiliate Disclosure: Some links in this article are affiliate links. If you buy through one of them I receive a small commission at no cost to you. I only link to products I have used personally or that meet the editorial standards for this site. Booking.com links above are partner placements; Amazon links use my mklibrary-20 associate tag.
Article Updates
- May 13, 2026: Closure-aware Mike-byline rewrite. Added Key Takeaways H2, “What Is Lake Manly?” definitional section, current 2026 status section with May 7 NPS conditions data, full Hurricane Hilary and February 2024 atmospheric river storm-sequence sections, the March 4, 2024 NPS boating prohibition with verbatim language, five-event reappearance pattern (2005, 2015, 2019, 2023-2024, 2025-2026) and corresponding SVG timeline, climate-change throughline with Daniel Swain UCLA quotes and Park Superintendent Mike Reynolds quote, restructured Pleistocene geology section with Blackwelder 1933 / Lowenstein 2024 / Ku 1998 / Hooke 1999 citations, Pleistocene-vs-modern comparison SVG, pupfish divergence correction (~10,000 years per Martin et al. 2016 not millions), William Lewis Manly biography section, new Timbisha Shoshone Country section acknowledging 1,000+ years of pre-contact occupation and the 2000 Homeland Act, refreshed 2026 visit info (cashless park, $30 vehicle fee, current campground rates), expanded first-person February 2024 kayak trip report with honest recontextualization that boating is now prohibited, 12-question FAQ with FAQPage JSON-LD schema, SimpleTOC block. Original publish date February 22, 2024 preserved.
- May 9, 2026: Added bidirectional links to /death-valley-super-bloom/ retrospective (paired atmospheric-river phenomenon), corrected “occured” typo, updated super bloom year list to include 2026.
