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.
Just a few miles north of me. Very rugged country around the Minarets. I once crossed a gully in my truck during a flash flood in a very remote part of Death Valley when I was young and dumb.