So, I've been to the Arizona Crater.
I've also been to Ubehebe Crater in Death Valley. Ubehebe Crater is volcanic, and smaller than the Arizona crater.
The key point, though, is that what they have in common is they're both exhausting to get OUT of.
The run down the trail to the bottom of Ubehebe Crater is great fun. Getting out? Entirely different matter. The walls are steep.
So.
If you want to go explore it (and you're not just going to plonk an air raft in the middle), then you get to haul your gear down the steep sides (in the wild, there may well not be a trail, so this can be treacherous). But in the end, that's easy-ish, gravity is on your side.
You make camp in the bottom. You run your scans, and soil samples, and, wait, is that a metal door in the crater wall over there? Wait, ignore that.
Anyway. Odds are high that the work at the bottom of the crater, outside of perhaps finding a snake, scorpion, or spider in your sleeping bag, will likely be uneventful. Then you have to drag all of that stuff back out, up those steep walls.
This is a desert environment. Small lizards, poisonous snakes, feral mice and rats. But no large predators, no real hiding spaces, the environ is the biggest obstacle.
Put it in a jungle, and you get all of the great fun of hidden -- anything.
Have you seen the LIDAR scans of Guatemala and the Mayan structures they're revealing?
A vast, interconnected network of ancient cities was home to millions more people than previously thought.
www.nationalgeographic.com
Hidden for hundreds of years. This is the mystery that a jungle offers. Plus Jaguars. Black Jaguars. Green, shiny eyes sizing you up from the bush. Talk to Lee Stroud about Jaguars. Being stalked by a big cat, with cover...do not underestimate that. It's bad enough here in the house with mine, the "domesticated" ones.
The desert, not so much.