Living in a desert teaches you the most important lesson in survival, "Water is life." People die here every year because they venture out on hikes without enough water. You learn the signs and symptoms of dehydration quickly, headache, muscle cramps, agitated mental state, confusion, and so on. In the desert, everything is second to water. Native Americans survived here for a thousand years with nothing but ingenuity and the ability to adapt to their environment....
Lived in Tucson and Los Cruces as well as El Paso. Water is important but you have to live with the changing temps. 115 in the summer and freezing in the winter. Work when it is cool or warm and having to change clothes to meet current temps. Working in the sun at 115 and no humidity sucks the water and minerals out of you, USAF made us drink every so much time on the flight line and take mineral tablets and limited work in hottest temps. Work early in morning or at night. Same with gardens, did well but needed a lot of good water and problems with salt retention in soil if irrigating. Had to sometimes "waste" water in order to wash out salts. Lots of areas like salt flats and the white sands region have a lot of water at times, but it is not drinkable. Conditions for survival can change in a few miles and with altitude. All given while you can not survive in the white sands, 20 or some miles to the east there were areas along some rivers that were very survivable and a few hundred feet higher were timbered areas with wild life. There are some areas of volcanic rock that will kill you if you try to cross them.
Without canals bringing in water, and AC many places in arid regions are uninhabitable. working construction in the Phoenix area is so much fun in the summer. I tire of hearing about how hot it is outside, it's always hot in the summer. nothing has changed during my lifetime. It is even more miserable in places with humidity and mosquitos.
Not so much an issue here of finding water as finding water that's safe to drink. I have humidity and mosquitoes a plenty, but just like surviving in the desert I've adapted to the summer heat here. If it wasn't for the weather man telling me how hot it was supposed to feel I probably wouldn't have noticed as much.
Too much time in the Sandbox and other such places like Uzbekistan. No thanks. I never want to see brown, burnt up grass and bushes again. Give me green and lots of water. Hell, I even dislike Summer when it is here. Spring and Autumn (North Idaho) is perfect but all that brown, no thanks. Now, I will be going to get a few more sun ulcers frozen and removed in memory of all those sunbaked years....
