We aren’t really super outdoorsy people as in doing anything extreme, but we like to do road trips and see the National Parks etc. I’ve been to Utah a few times. We’ve never seen a flash flood, but we’ve been there after they’ve had rainfall and seen the evidence. Mother Nature can mess you up in a hurry. I try to be careful at the National, state parks, etc. with the kids and myself, but sometimes things happen even if you are being careful and learning from other people’s missteps. I always stress with the kids, epsecially with heights or water, this is not the place to be acting like a nut. We have not been to Yosemite. It looks super-beautiful, but every year I year about something happening there or some other National Park. It would have been better for the last two to have just let the other one go down, but they weren’t thinking at that moment and obviously not minutes before about the extreme danger they were in. Unfortunately, no do-overs in life. I always pray to goodness that my kids will be safe. I don’t know how parents keep on living after those kind of tragedies.
Anyway, if you like to explore, know that our desert states in the Western US have quite a bit of danger when you get out in the wilds.
One particular danger we're always made aware of are the damned old abandoned vertical mine shafts dotting the landscape all over Nevada and Arizona. There's tens of thousands of known mines, and they're stumbled upon all the time by unfortunate folks. We read about it all the time.
The other thing we're known for here are the uncountable number of civil aviation plane crashes in the Sierra range and all over Nevada. When the famous aviator Steve Fossett went missing in his plane crossing the Sierra just a few miles south of my home, thousands of volunteers spread out searching for him. They managed to come across more than 100 crash sites that were known to the BLM rangers, and about 25 more that closed the book on open cases of missing aviators before they finally found Fossett's site. There must be a thousand crash sites up here, military and civilians, many of them in nearly unreachable locations that the remains of the pilots and passengers are still present, sort of like how 1940s actress Carole Lombard's DC3 plowed right into a mountain in clear weather and some of her is still up there, it's said. Hardy hikers still go visit that site, and there's detailed info on the web about these sites.
Seems that newbie private pilots with fresh FAA licenses just can't help showing off by renting planes and flying their dates to Tahoe for the weekend. These mountains can just toss a plane around like a maple seed pod in a storm.
If it's not pilots and hikers meeting their maker out here, it's kayakers and rock climbers and cave spelunkers and goofballs entering 100 year old silver mines, bighorn sheep hunters, or just poor saps who decide on a lark to go off-road with unreliable vehicles and maybe three swigs water in a cup. Read the local paper during vacation season and it's always some visitor biting the dust one way or another. Everybody with a cell phone thinks that's all anyone needs.