Photographer John Sirlin was in a canyon in the northeast part of Death Valley National Park late Thursday to shoot lightning in an expected thunderstorm.
Then the lightning petered out and the storm became a nonstop torrential downpour that lasted for hours, bringing near-record rainfall to one of the hottest, driest places on Earth.
“It seemed serious,” said the 46-year-old from Chandler, Arizona, who also leads storm-chasing workshops. “It was a magnitude of flooding I had not experienced before.”
