Las Vegas, Grand Canyon & Arizona Meteor Crater

Driving into Las Vegas

We motored into Las Vegas yesterday after a 4 hour drive from Los Angeles. "The Strip" (actually Las Vegas Boulevard) has grown even more in 6 years. We decided to catch a movie after eating and cruised the strip after dark until it was time for our movie. The size of the screens on the side of the road have to be seen to be believed, they are multi-stories high. There are so many flashing lights and screens, it's enough to induce an epileptic fit.

The movie was The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kiera Knightley, was about Alan Turing who built the first computer to break the Nazi Enigma code and shortened World War II, thus saving millions of lives. Very, very good film, go see it.

Today we left early (or so I thought) to get to the Grand Canyon in time for our helicopter flight. What I didn't count on was a time zone change, Arizona is on Mountain Time and we lost an hour. Once we got to the turn off to the Canyon, it was still and hour to get there and our flight was due in 10 minutes, so we rang the company and they put us on a later flight, so a disaster was averted.

Cresting the rim

After the mandatory safety briefing, they strapped us into an Ecoflight helicopter, incidentally the same machine we flew around Kaua'i in 2012. We paid extra this time to ensure we got the front seats and it was worth it for the view. The pilot took us over snow-covered forest to the highest point of the canyon, then before we reached the edge, started playing Also Sprach Zarathrusta and just as the initial crescendo of that arrived, we breached the edge of the canyon. The view was breathtaking as the ground, which up till now had been about 50 feet below us, fell away to a mile below. There was a collective "Wow!" from all the passengers, including your erstwhile scribe.

Awesome view

They say your life is not measured by the number of breaths you take, but by the number of events that take your breath away. This was one of them. If you ever come to the Grand Canyon, make sure you take the helicopter tour, you will not regret it.

After that, it was a mad dash to drive an hour and a half to reach the Arizona Meteor Crater before a) it closed and b) the light faded (which it does early this time of year). We made it just in time and with very little petrol left in the car.

Climbing up to the rim, we beheld another awesome sight and another breath-taking moment. The largest, most well preserved astrobleme on the planet. It's so big, I could not fit it in one photo, I'm going to have to stitch several photos together to make a panoramic shot. The crater is a mile across and 400 feet deep. The meteor that hit it was the size of a house travelling at 9 miles a second, releasing the equivalent energy of a 20 megaton atomic bomb. We saw a film about how the crater was formed, toured the museum a little, then hit the road back to Flagstaff for some food (we had skipped lunch in the mad dash to the helicopter) and fuel. In fact the low fuel light came on just 5 miles from the petrol station. I was sweating on that.

Arizona Meteor Crater