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Several years ago I was living in Ridgecrest (right outside Death Valley) and my parents came to visit me. We planned a trip to Las Vegas via Death Valley. At one point my dad thought it would be fun to take a more “scenic” route and guided me along a “short cut”. Unfortunately this road was full of potholes and I was an inexperienced driver (going way too fast) and got a flat front tire. After inspecting my rear tire I noticed it also had a nice size bulge in it, but it hadn't blown. I put the spare on and then I carefully drove out of there. The scary thing is that based on the description of this article we were close to where this incident occurred because it was not far after leaving Trona. However, we were still on an actual road and there were at least two people that we passed taking nature photos along the way, so we weren't completely hopeless if the other tire blew. Still, reading this article brings back those fears that I had at the time of how close we were to being in real danger.