To Potter and Wellington, and from a historical point of view, it is obvious that the Frankincense trail led through wilderness areas, but it also led to populated areas. It was impossible for Lehi to move along the Frankincense trail and not be detected by the local inhabitants. Historian William Hamblin makes this comment:
A theoretical reconstruction of Lehi's stay in southern Arabia could run something like this. Lehi and his family eventually arrive in Hadramawt, at that time a highly populated region serving as one of the main trade routes of southern Arabia. There they would have necessarily made contact with the local inhabitants, if only because every well in the region would have been owned by some tribe or city, and strangers would not have been allowed to drink from the wells without permission.
Obviously these same conditions that Lehi faced in the Hadramawt would also have applied in Dhofar. [George Potter and Richard Wellington, Discovering the Lehi-Nephi Trail, Unpublished Manuscript, 2000, pp. 183-184] [See the commentary on 1 Nephi 18:2]