When I was 6 years old and went to Death Valley with my father the car we were in had all the paint taken off in a sand storm

This was the only time in my life where all the paint came off a vehicle I was in. The worst that happened on another occasion around this time was when a friend of ours' 1953 new Chevrolet car had it's exhaust system ripped out completely by driving up Castle Lake Road near Mt. Shasta before they paved this road at that time.

However, we started out in the San Diego area where I and my parents lived then when I was 5 or 6 years old and then we all drove to Death Valley. It wasn't our car (so we were happy about this) and I think this too was a new Oldsmobile or Chevrolet then in 1953 also when this happened that the sand blasted all the paint off the car completely. So, you can imagine the bloody mess any person would be exposed to flying sand (literally sand blasting everything in 100 mile per hour winds or more across the Death Valley Desert.

So, there are a few ways you could die in Death Valley:

No Water 

127 degrees some summer days without water

Sand Blasted to a bloody pulp unless you found shelter in a car or bury yourself in a sand with a T-Shirt over your face so you could still breathe through the cloth of a T-shirt in a sand Storm.

Most people have never experienced this who don't live on the deserts of the world. However, I did when I was 6 at Death Valley.

Since I was always a mountain climber I also experienced an ICE STorm on top of San Gorgonio where my face was bleeding from being hit with shards of ice at over 100 miles per hour. Luckily I was carrying some greenhouse plastic to slide down the snow on Mt. San Gorgonio which is at around 11,000 feet and the highest peak in Southern California. However, the highest peak in the lower 48 states is Mt. Whitney in the Sierra Nevada Range in California too.

When I couldn't find the other climbers I was with because they must have summitted and gone down already I gave up because the 100 mph gusts of ice crystals were hitting my face and knocking me down off my feet onto the rocks. So, I decided I needed to survive more than be on top of that Mountain anymore so I got my plastic off my face where it was being protected from more bleeding from ice crystals and slid down the snow to Slushy meadows which is to the East of the Peak of San Gorgonio and the basic area where I had come from and had to go to get back to my car and the other climbers.