They heard the flood coming, but by the time the man and his fellow hikers realized what it was, it was too late. They stood behind a boulder and hugged each other until the rising water level swept them apart.
That’s what the man told author Craig Childs months after the flood subsided. Childs wrote about the flood in the Grand Canyon in the book, “The Desert Cries: A Season of Flash Floods in a Dry Land.” He says he’s witnessed numerous flood events in the canyon, so when he saw the news about this past weekend’s flash flood, he wasn’t surprised.
“Bright Angel Creek is a major drainage going down to the river,” says Childs. “Wherever a storm hits, you end up with a big flood. If you look back over the last month, there have been major flash floods, but most of them happen on creeks that really nobody's in there, and it's only people on the river who see it come out the other end. So we've had a season full of flash floods.”
This weekend’s flood happened below the area that was hit by the 2025 Dragon Bravo Fire at the headwaters of Bright Angel Creek. The infrastructure below the creek at Phantom Ranch is a rare example of human habitation in the otherwise remote expanse of the Grand Canyon.
After severe flash flooding in Grand Canyon National Park on Saturday afternoon, officials on Monday said a second person has been found dead. More than a dozen are still unaccounted for as of this story’s publishing.
A cloudburst dumped half an inch to an inch of rain in about 30 minutes on the North Rim at the top of the canyon. Runoff then raced down steep cliffs and creeks more than 4,000 feet to the bottom of the canyon where people were hiking, staying at camps and floating on the Colorado River. Bridges and other infrastructure were wiped out.
“Things are probably a huge mess down there because so much sediment flows down with these flash floods, and they get so concentrated into one place that you end up with, in many ways, a lot more debris than water,” Childs says. “The water is just the vehicle, and it ends up carrying so much material: boulders, trees, bridges. So you're looking at a place that's receiving material from the much larger Grand Canyon, focused like a funnel down into a narrow canyon where it just piles up and then ejects into the river.”
In 1997, Childs was downstream of a similar flood that also flashed down Bright Angel Creek. Two people were killed in that deluge. A raft going by shouted for him to look for bodies floating down the river.
“To be in these floods, or at least near them, is exceptional,” Childs says. “They're incredibly loud and violent, and you can smell them. They smell of everything that's been carried down in the Grand Canyon.”
Childs interviewed the survivor of that 1997 flood, the man who watched his compatriots get swept away.
“He told me that at one point he got ejected out of the flood and shot into the air like a cannonball,” he says. “The hydraulics threw him out, and for a moment he could see all around him. But then he plunged right back into it.”
Childs says if he has any message to canyon visitors, it’s that desert flash floods often hit on what might look like a clear day. But because of the long drainages, they'll come from a great distance. Sometimes, hikers don’t get any warning at all.
“I've been in a number of these floods,” he says. “I've been up on ledges in them. I studied floods for a long time, the hydrology of them, and so I think by studying them, I was looking for them, and by looking for them, I was aware … that this is all a flood path.”
