The desert is surely a place for night travel in the summer, if you must walk somewhere. Seeing is not always that hard, once your eyes adjust to the dark.
It was pretty common in the military to have to move at night, without night vision equipment. Tactically, it is safer although night vision, FLIR and thermal imaging make it less desireable. One thing to consider is that few soldiers have night vision equipment, often do not use it on the move because of depth perception problems and some sensors can be overcome by resoucefulness. We once hid successfully from an AC-130 gunship while on a training mission. It did not take much. However, as the AC-130 crew said later, if we had fired on you, even though we did not see you, you would likely gotten up and ran!
Anyway, night travel may not always be desired but in an emergency may be a necessity. Having a good light source and navigation aids, along with the ability to travel in darkness, is a good skill to aquire.