From my laymen perspective I'd say the terrain itself is less of a problem, the change in temperatures is much more extreme. This article from 2014 has many insights into prior Curiosity wheel damage:

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2014/0819063...

This is a great article. Thanks for the link.

One thing it points out is that the rocks in that particular part of Mars are special: they are sharp and cemented into the terrain. There are places on Earth that have this kind of rock, but they are unusual. The wheels do fine in a rocks-in-sand scenario.

The article goes into a lot of detail, and it turns out that some of the obvious armchair science explanations for what is happening are not the case. For instance, the main constraint on the mass of the wheels was not keeping the liftoff mass of the payload under some limit.

Sharper rocks than a lot of Earth deserts - less wind and no water to smooth things down.

More broadly, though, there are some deserts on Earth that are pretty hair-raising. The NPS guidelines for driving deep in the Canyonlands (on roads, no less) warns that with a high-clearance 4WD pickup, you should still expect "considerable risk of vehicle damage". Curiosity is going a lot slower, but it doesn't have the luxury of roads or anyone to toss on a spare tire.

Depends on which trail in Canyonlands. Some of those are extremely technical crawl trails where you need a spotter and are planning every ten feet of movement, not unlike the Rubicon. White Rim is more of what I would call a road; watching a couple videos of people running it, I'd be less worried about damage there. (It's on my list for this spring.)

Honestly Jeep owners read a warning like that and get excited. Every scar in my paint is a new story, but to your point, getting the tools out in the backcountry is usually not fun.

Yeah, fair. I was specifically quoting the warnings for the Maze, which is remote enough that they desperately want to avoid tows and rescues.

I'd love to do White Rim whenever I get a chance, the overlooks onto it make it look wonderful. The Maze stuff looks much less friendly, but it's on the 'someday' list.

Oh, sure. The Maze was the area I was thinking of as well. I have a few thousand dollars of work and a lot more practice before I could comfortably consider those trails. I know my limits and I'd rather not hike out of Utah.

They drive it over desert-like terrains now to avoid such problems, but AFAIK the very first hole punched to one of the wheels was due to a small pointy rock. Martians rocks suck.