They Had About Ten Minutes. The Bridge Wasn't There Anymore.

Gabe Bergemann was at Phantom Ranch with his family on Saturday afternoon when he looked up and thought a monsoon had landed directly on their cabin. Within minutes, the creek beside the campground had turned the color of wet cement and was carrying pieces of the maintenance yard down toward the Colorado River. A park ranger started shouting for everyone to move. Bergemann's group, along with roughly 60 other hikers and campers, ran for the one footbridge still standing and crossed it single file as the water climbed. About ten minutes later, that bridge was gone too.

By the time the flash flood finished tearing through Bright Angel Canyon, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, nearly every footbridge spanning Bright Angel Creek had been destroyed, along with long stretches of the park's only water pipeline. Two men who had hiked in together three days earlier — John Giusti, a 46-year-old chiropractor, and Brent Rosenkranz, a 42-year-old martial arts instructor, both from Granbury, Texas — did not make it out. Their friend, Wyoming pilot Timothy Smith, 53, is still missing as of Tuesday, and search teams are now working the canyon floor with cadaver dogs.

Four rounds of rain, and the fourth one was the killer

The National Weather Service says the storm that hit Bright Angel Canyon on Saturday came in four separate waves over about six hours. The first three soaked the ground without causing much visible trouble. It was the fourth wave — a burst dropping roughly half an inch to an inch of rain in just thirty minutes over already-saturated, steeply pitched terrain — that turned the canyon floor into a chute. A U.S. Geological Survey gauge recorded the Colorado River rising eight feet in a single hour. On Bright Angel Creek itself, the water rose more than five feet in ten minutes, and rose so fast it destroyed the sensor that was measuring it.

Gregory was traveling with Bergemann's family and said the debris-choked water moved in circles like a whirlpool, carrying cabins and maintenance equipment past them as they climbed to safety. If the ranger hadn't ordered the evacuation when he did, Gregory believes the whole group could have been trapped on the wrong side of the creek.

Meteorologists point to one more factor stacking the odds against the canyon floor: a chunk of the rain fell on ground scorched by the Dragon Bravo Fire, the wildfire that tore through the North Rim in the summer of 2025 and destroyed the historic Grand Canyon Lodge. Burned soil sheds water instead of absorbing it, and National Weather Service meteorologist Justin Johndrow, based in Flagstaff, put it plainly to the Associated Press: most of that rain never had a chance to soak in.

A number that kept shrinking — until it almost didn't

The scale of the emergency was genuinely unclear for most of the weekend. The National Park Service's earliest count, built off backcountry permits and vehicle license plates left in trailhead lots, put more than 20 people as missing or unaccounted for by Sunday. That number fell to around 15 by Sunday night, and by Monday evening, incident commander Dave Black told reporters that all but one person had been found. At least 82 people were pulled out of the flood zone over the weekend — the first 45 by nightfall Saturday, the rest the following day — many of them lifted out by helicopter to the South Rim, where the American Red Cross had set up a landing point at Maswik Lodge.

The two confirmed deaths came a day apart. The body of a 46-year-old man was recovered Sunday night near Crystal Rapids on the Colorado River; his family identified him Monday as Giusti, a married father of three daughters. A second body was recovered Monday and identified Tuesday, through a joint statement from both families, as Rosenkranz — a husband, a father of three sons, and, according to that statement, a martial arts instructor who spent much of his life mentoring young people. Smith, the third member of their party, is a husband and father of three as well, and flies for the private jet company NetJets. Before the trip, Rosenkranz had posted photos from the trailhead, writing that the three of them were about to cover more than 31 miles in four days, each carrying a 40-pound pack. He called it an adventure.

The park's water line is now the second crisis

Behind the search-and-rescue effort sits a second, quieter emergency: the Transcanyon Waterline, a 12.5-mile pipeline built in the 1960s that supplies essentially all of the Grand Canyon's drinking water, took catastrophic damage. Park officials estimate roughly 40% of the line has been destroyed or damaged, and Deputy Superintendent Brian Drapeaux told reporters Monday night that crews expect to find miles more once they can fully assess the wreckage. The park says it currently has about two weeks of stored water left. Overnight lodging is suspended, campers are under dry-camping restrictions with no access to water spigots, and open fires are banned — even as the park itself stays open for day visitors on both rims.

More rain was already in the forecast

None of this arrived at a convenient moment to stop. The National Weather Service kept a flood watch active across northern and central Arizona through Monday evening, warning of "raging killer currents" in side canyons and slot canyons and cautioning that low-water crossings could flood without notice. Jack Schmidt, who directs the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University, told the Associated Press that the flood was simply a reminder of how dynamic and unpredictable the canyon's landscape can be — a description that, after this weekend, feels almost gentle.

Grand Canyon National Park drew 4.43 million visitors last year, making it the fourth-most-visited national park in the country. Most of those visitors will never set foot below the rim. The people who do — hikers headed for Phantom Ranch, rafters on the Colorado, backcountry permit holders chasing the kind of trip Giusti, Rosenkranz, and Smith had planned — are trusting a canyon that, twice in just over a year now, has turned violently on the people inside it.

Reporting and details in this piece draw on CBS News, ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, NBC News, The Hill, and The San Francisco Chronicle.