This was likely in 1969 or 1970 and I was driving near the mountains where Big Bear is only I was still down on the desert nearer to Old Woman Springs road and Pioneertown where they used to make cowboy movies in the old days.
I was driving along in my new 1968 Camaro and I was about 20 or 21 years old driving alone when I looked up and saw something strange coming at me from in front of me. I suddenly saw a wall of water several feet high coming at me out of the mountains. Being used to being in a state with flash flooding I knew immediately my life was in danger from this. So, I floored my car by depressing the gas pedal to the floor while I spun the car suddenly in the opposite direction and then kept it floored to go over 70 mph down this paved road out of there before my car was going sideways across the desert on a wall of water.
This experience though scary I survived okay and so did my car without any damage luckily.
Another experience with desert flooding was when I was younger. Instead of a wall of water we were headed the back way across the desert from Lucerne Valley towards Landers and that area and we used to call these roads "whoopie roads" simply because they went up and down and you could get a car air born on the upper parts of the roads as they went up and down at least 10 feet in altitude or more. So, this would have been around 1960 to 1962 so I would have been 12 to 14 years old when this happened.
A guy passed us going about 90 mph who was having fun driving through the flooded sections of the highway. It got pretty deep as we went up high and then down into a dry washes now wet from the flooding in the desert there on the paved road then. We saw him go through several flooded areas at really high speed which made water rooster tails from his car go 20 to 30 feet in the air. But, eventually he hit a more flooded section that was about 3 to 4 feet deep and when he hit this section at about 90 mph it took the front of the car and bent it upward along with the hood of the car. So, when we came upon him and stopped to ask if he needed help he was in shock because his car was destroyed basically and could not be driven the way it was at all. Even though people didn't wear seat belts then if you were driving you could hold onto the steering wheel so when he stopped really fast he didn't go through the windshield. That's what people did who were driving then. Luckily, he had no passengers just a sore chest from his chest hitting the steering wheel that hard as his car stopped suddenly.
Luckily, no pieces of the car were driven through the front windshield so he survived this okay then.
However, you also have to realize people were a lot different in how they dealt with things in the 1950s and 1960s too than now.
We were able to drive through this section okay at 1 or 2 miles per hour with the truck we were driving and our truck didn't stall because it was high enough off the ground the way it was built so the spark plugs were above the water where they entered the cylinders of the engine. So, we were okay even though he and his car were not okay.
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