It is the antidote to Las Vegas. Take off early in the morning when the desert air is cool. Farewell to the string of make-believe hotels along The Strip, to its bleary blink of neon. Goodbye to the constant babble of slot machines, the polystyrene "marble" of Venice and Rome, to the boom of the pirate battle on main street outside Treasure Island. Far, far below you, the Eiffel Tower - an appropriate Vegas exclamation mark - swiftly recedes into insignificance. Viva Las Vegas? Let's forget it. Seize the morning, seize the day.
So ran my thoughts as I sat with my wife inside a helicopter, swooping above the Arizona desert, the clatter of chopper blades hacking the silence. There was an air of expectation among the six passengers, all of us gazing at folds of rock, at the shoelace zig-zag of the river in the distance, as we stared through the clear glass pod, giving unbroken visibility.
You travel quickly. The flight is smooth. The miniscule shadow of the helicopter crossing the undulations of rock far beneath is your only indication of speed. What feels like 40 miles an hour is 120. And so we crossed the craggy edge, the serrated extreme of the rocky precipice, and swooped low into the chasm - our destination creating a dust-up of grit and sand as the chopper touched earth, and we came to rest.
There, slithering past us, green and sluggish, hugging the contours of the cliffs, slid the lazy Colorado River. All around us the canyon was silent. A small, dark, unidentified bird flew past. My eye followed it and I found myself gazing up at the gulch of high air across which, on a powerbike, Evil Knievil had once attempted to leap into space, launched from a ramp with the force of a rocket, defying a plunge to certain death. How high were these cliffs? How far the drop? Was this the height of incongruity? Of folly? Was Evil crazy? Or had he stumbled on the perfect place to die, among the boulders and the cacti and the unpolluted air?
The birds in the canyon roosted on ledges, sometimes gliding on outspread wings to land on the rocks that fringed the river. They seemed not to sing, as if awed by their habitat, by the towering, sheer magnificence of a landscape that rose to flat bluffs and teetering pinnacles of rock. To call this place "grand" seemed somehow begrudging, an understatement.
Like calling Richard Gere a bloke. And there he was. My wife was the first to say it out loud. "Can it really be him?" We both knew it couldn't. "Must be his double," she whispered. We stared. I couldn't deny it. Richard was fetching a bottle of bubbly from the chopper, setting it up on a wooden table beneath the Ramada, an authentic Indian cooking shelter, built by the Hualapai Indians close to the river.
There were picnic baskets too, one for each passenger. Richard smiled as we gathered around him. "I'm just a waiter who flies a helicopter," he joked. His real name was Matt; he was our pilot. He poured some fizz and we opened our baskets, containing turkey, potato salad, salad dressing, and a cookie. Out there it was warm, but beneath the awning, in cool grey shade, we ate in style. Matt poured impeccably. In profile, he had the look of a minor hero, and in his white shirt with perfect pleats and dark epaulettes, he was reminiscent of Richard Gere as I remembered him in An Officer And A Gentleman.
"Don't forget we have just half an hour here, more or less," he said. "Time for photographs and a little exploration. Some more champagne?" In every direction the view was superb. Viewing the canyon from the ground provided a sense of scale and perspective that were unique. To swoop down more than 4,000 feet to the canyon floor brought a new sense of awe.
Perhaps what I felt was a feeble echo of the feelings of the Indians who still live here: the Hualapai and Navajo who own areas of the plateaux and neighbouring valleys. Certain landmarks, sandstone buttes carved by the wind and smoothed by rain, they revere as places of the spirit. I stood by the river, along which parties of modern adventurers forage in rafts. Thick green, like a filmy soup, it oozed and tapered into the distance. Yet it was treacherous, deep and deadly farther upstream, full of white-water and whirlpool rapids, a river-chameleon changing shape and personality.
It was along this same Colorado, all the way from distant Wyoming, that in 1869 John Wesley Powell led a party of explorers, afloat on a mixture of faith and good fortune, to make detailed maps of the canyon's interior. This opened the route, and in 1901 the Santa Fe Railroad reached the canyon's southern rim.
But none of the pioneers ever knew more than the core of the canyon. They never reached the uncharted wilderness, the labyrinthine gorges, where even the Indians, hunting and foraging, feared to trek. Today, in the age of aviation, this hidden landscape, which once drew mythological force from its very hiddenness, is a myth for the opposite reason: we see it and marvel. The Hualapai Indians own the land on which we stood. They are paid a landing fee of $3 for every tourist who touches down.
We moseyed around the river's edge, fingering cacti, surreptitiously pocketing pebbles as souvenirs and taking photographs. Every scrap of litter was gathered. The chopper blades whirred; strapped in our seats, headphones snug, our disbelief welled as we rose and banked to skirt the cliff face, just clearing its edge, the distant vista of the canyon's neighbouring gulches becoming clearer, and all the while the river coiled through one of the wonders of the world.
"Someone's breathing a little heavily into their mike," said Matt. "Turn the volume down." It was me.
The flight back to Vegas was accompanied by a commentary from Matt. He played swelling music, full of portent, the theme from The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, and showed us the wagon train trails made through sagebrush, tracks taken more than 100 years ago by west-bound pioneers, families seeking a better life, prepared to risk everything. Many died.
He pointed out extinct volcanoes, and sudden outcrops of reds and greens across the rock face, revealing deposits of iron and copper, their streaks blending subtly into the ochre and umber landscape of the desert. Approaching Lake Mead, the largest manmade lake in America, the clatter of our propellers merged with the theme from Apocalypse Now, evoking images of the sinister flock of helicopter gunships above the forests of Vietnam, raining down death.
To see the canyon and its hinterland at their most awesome, come in September, Matt suggested: "Come late in the day and catch the sunset across the whole vista."
I pictured sundown as it would bleed into the waters of the lake and tinge the hills. Someone once told me that the ghosts of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley were seen there, dancing arm-in-arm across the glistening evening sheen, like spectres-in-residence. This seemed less remarkable than the view, far away beyond. From the Kaibab Plateau to the north, the Colorado River approaches the lake like a silver scribble, a tiny filigree of life amid the unquenchable thirst of the desert.
Las Vegas itself is water-rich. Lake Mead provides, and the daily hunger of the city for electricity is satisfied by power from the Hoover Dam, the final landmark along our flight path.
Vegas today is an urban virus spreading out across the desert, its population increasing by 29,000 a month. Matt pointed out exclusive homes, the golf-course country clubs. "Down there, that house with black glass, that's Arnold Schwarzenegger's place."
A house with a swimming pool and four bedrooms will set you back a ridiculous £90,000. But there's a catch. You'd have to live with that neon-pulse behind your eyelids all the time. Matt took us in low, gave us the chance to point our cameras at our bedrooms in the casino-hotels beneath.
Our three-hour adventure had shown us a world of startling contrasts. A canyon eroding at nature's behest. A city in flux. The trip was expensive, but took us to places we would dream about. To call it the trip of a lifetime would deny all hope of returning. But our lifetimes were enhanced by having been there. Our dream was real.
Tom Adair travelled with Continental Air- lines (for reservations, phone 0800 776464) and was a guest of Heli USA. His Pegasus VIP Grand Canyon Flight cost $299. Website: www.heliusa.net. For a free information pack on Las Vegas, phone 0044 8705 238832.