John Sorenson seems to think that weary sea travellers, including aged Lehi and perhaps Sariah and Ishmael's wife, would not initially go "forth upon the land" (1 Nephi 18:23) more than a few miles before settling and planting their seeds. The handful of men would have felt uncomfortable about leaving their families or crops so their explorations would have been very limited (estimated one night away from base, a radius of about 25 miles?). [John Sorenson The Geography of Book of Mormon Events: A Source Book, F.A.R.M.S., p. 232]
Note* This statement, as well as all the other geographical comments from John Sorenson's Source Book are written from an entirely internal point of view (not related to any real lands or cultures). While I agree with Sorenson's ideas on the initial settlement of Lehi's party close to the landing site, I would hesitate to put exploration limits on a group of men and women who had traversed nearly 2500 miles of wilderness from Jerusalem to Bountiful under great hardship, and who had managed to cross 17,000 miles of ocean.
According to the proposed chronology (see Appendix A), Nephi might have only stayed in the landing area for four to eight years. How much and how far the people in Lehi's party "went forth upon the land" during that time is anybody's guess. When Nephi eventually fled from Laman and Lemuel, did he know where he was going when he "traveled many days" "in the wilderness" (2 Nephi 5:7)? [Alan C. Miner, Personal Notes] [See the commentary on 2 Nephi 5:34]
“We Went Forth Upon the Land”
According to Brant Gardner, in order to more fully appreciate the Book of Mormon as an ancient text, we need to find multiple interconnected complex sets of connection points between it and a proposed cultural context. We necessarily begin with the origin of Lehi's people in the New World. Assuming a Mesoamerican setting, it is indisputable that Lehi and his company landed on a coast, and the Pacific coast is the most plausible location. If a ship carrying Lehi's party were to have arrived on the coast of Guatemala approximately 590 years before Christ, what might they have found?
The archaeological survey of the Middle Formative sites for the coast of Guatemala deals with sites dated some two hundred years earlier than Lehi's landing, so we need to make some inferences. Two hundred years prior to Lehi's arrival there were seven settlements ranging from one household to twelve households. After this time, the coastal areas saw a peak of population density not seen until the Late Classic period, over a thousand years later. It is important to understand that the settlement areas were not necessarily larger, but simply morel numerous.
What this tells us is that Lehi's company would have found it nearly impossible to remain isolated for long, if they were ever isolated at all. Lehi's company had every reason to accept aid from, and a merger with, local populations. Lehi's group would plant seeds from the Old World, but a rapid acquisition of information about survival skills particular to the New World would have been extremely important. They would have needed to know about the local food sources that were successful, the local sources of materials for clothing, the locations and types of clay for pottery, and any number of location-specific cultural items. [Brant Gardner, "A Social History of the Early Nephites," delivered at the FAIR Conference, August 17, 2001, pp. 2-3]