The West Rim of the Grand Canyon sits on Hualapai tribal land, outside the boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park — which is why helicopters may descend below the rim here at all. Federal airspace rules closed most of the park's interior to low-altitude flight in 1987. The Hualapai Nation, whose reservation covers roughly a million acres along 108 miles of the Colorado River, permits landings on a plateau some 4,000 feet below the canyon's upper edge. That single jurisdictional fact created the entire category of the grand canyon and las vegas strip helicopter tour with landing. The rock beneath those skids is older than most of what tourists photograph anywhere on earth. Vishnu Schist at the canyon's base dates to roughly 1.7 billion years. Above it, Tapeats Sandstone, Redwall Limestone and Kaibab Formation stack in bands legible from the air as clean horizontal stripes. The Colorado River, which carved the gorge over five to six million years, runs a muddy green through the floor. Eagle Point and Guano Point sit on the rim above; the Skywalk, a horseshoe of glass cantilevered 70 feet past the cliff edge, opened in March 2007. The route between Las Vegas and the West Rim is itself a compressed geography lesson. Aircraft leaving the valley's heliports cross Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States by volume, and pass Hoover Dam, completed in 1935 after five years of construction. Then comes the extinct volcano field of Fortification Hill and the Grand Wash Cliffs, where the Colorado Plateau ends abruptly. Most Las Vegas Grand Canyon tour routes cover roughly 130 miles each way. The Strip flyover on the return leg is a different kind of monument. Its resorts are largely younger than the Skywalk — a corridor of about four miles of casino frontage rebuilt continuously since the 1990s, best read after dark when the Luxor's sky beam and the Sphere's exterior display dominate the skyline. Las Vegas remains one of the few American cities where a scenic helicopter corridor runs directly over the urban core. Helicopter sightseeing from Las Vegas began commercially in the 1960s and now accounts for a substantial share of visits to the West Rim. Operators fly modern EC130 and A-Star airframes with forward-facing seats and noise-reduced rotor systems. The demand for a grand canyon and las vegas strip helicopter tour with landing rests on that combination: a canyon floor few visitors reach on foot, and a skyline visible only from above.