Near-Death Experience: A Sand Storm in Death Valley

Hi everybody! I decided to share not-so-fun story with you. During our journey in the United States we drove through Death Valley. As you may know Death Valley is a very dry and hot place located in the border of Nevada and California. It's also very low, the lowest point is 86m under the sea-level. You can read more about Death Valley here.

But back to the story. We were driving through Death Valley and we stopped to a shop. The view was absolutely amazing and the heat was so uncomfortable. I saw something far away, I didn't know what it was but it looked like a cloud. I didn't bother to think more about it so we continued driving towards the cloud.

We saw a huge sand storm ahead but we had to go through it

The road led straight to the cloud and at first we were like "Oh cool! A sand storm, this is gonna be such an amazing experience". But once my dad drove forward we realized it was actually pretty serious. The wind made our car shake and as we carefully drove forward we couldn't see then sun or the sky anymore. It was so dark.

This picture was taken when you could still see something, later you couldn't see anything

We had turned our air conditioner off but still it started to smell like sand inside the car. We knew that this bad sandstorms can be fatal so we started to panic. We couldn't drive faster than maybe 10km/h because we couldn't see. It was absolutely impossible to see where the road was. I looked out from the window all I could see was a brown sand wall.

"Can you check that we are still on the road?" My dad asked as the cloud got even thicker. I checked out of my window and I barely saw the road. "Ye-no-yes I guess we are" I said. I felt so terrible and all I could think about was "I'm not ready to die".

We discussed about turning back. But it really wasn't an option. When you can't even see the road, how do you make an U-turn? And how can you be sure that if there comes another car it won't hit you? How about if our car would break? We would have to go outside into the storm because we couldn't stay in the car because of the heat.

The wind was strong and there was sand flying everywhere

It was already a bit harder to breathe as I felt how the sand got in to my lungs. All I saw was sand. All I tasted was sand. All I smelled was sand. We were in a big trouble. Even the temperature inside the car started to rise. The problem was that if something would go wrong we would probably die so all of us were feeling anxious.

If our car would have broke we wouldn't have found any help,

Suddenly the cloud started to vanish. I saw some bushes about 5m away and I could even see a small spot of blue sky. I felt so relieved. We drove faster because we really wanted to get out of there before the storm would reach us again. Luckily we got to the other side of the valley safely.

I can't say that it was a good experience, but it was an experience. Now that I think about it - it was quite amazing and definitely a once in a lifetime thing. Still we could have died and I'm happy to be alive.