Surrounded by stunning desert landscapes and mind-boggling open spaces just begging to be hiked in, climbed or explored by car, bike or helicopter, Las Vegas has a nature all of its own.
The following natural wonders can be visited from Las Vegas in a day. Numerous tours are available.
Red Rock Canyon
This incredible Mojave Desert rock formation known as Red Rock Canyon is just a half-hour drive west of the Strip.
Sandstone walls up to 900m high get rock climbers excited, while there are kilometres of hiking trails for more grounded adventurers. You can also admire the canyon from the saddle of a mountain bike, horse or scooter, or get an aerial perspective in a helicopter.
Alternatively, you could stick to the seat of a high-performance (or even low-performance) car: a one-way 21-kilometre scenic drive provides spectacular views.
Keep your eyes peeled for wildlife, including desert tortoises, ground squirrels, desert bighorn sheep and wild burros (AKA donkeys).
Photograph: Alamy
Hoover Dam and Lake Mead
Ok, so technically the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead are man-made and not “natural wonders”, but they’re pretty special and offer a great excuse to get out of town and suck up some fresh air under that big Nevada sky.
There are lots of numbers associated with the Hoover Dam: built during the Great Depression, its wall is 221 metres tall, 200 metres wide at the base and holds back almost 2.5 million cubic metres of water. Suffice to say, it’s big, it’s an engineering marvel, and you can drive across it.
As well as providing power and water for three states, the dam attracts one million visitors a year, and they can’t all be wrong.
Next door, Lake Mead (formed by the Hoover Dam) provides a chance to fish, waterski, canoe, hike and/or camp. And it’s all less than an hour from the Strip.
Valley of Fire
The Las Vegas resorts offer some pretty spectacular shows, but gravity-defying, petrified sand dunes? Only nature can manage that.
Just a few kilometres from Lake Mead, the Valley of Fire is Nevada’s oldest and largest state park. What were shifting sand dunes during the age of the dinosaurs have turned to astonishing sandstone formations over a painstaking 150 million years. And you thought Vegas was all about the shiny and new.
Rock art from ancient park visitors (occupation dates back to 300 BCE) is another reminder of local history. There’s a heap of flora and fauna to see here too: cacti, birds, lizards and snakes call it home, alongside coyotes, jackrabbits and more.
At sunrise or sunset, the rocks can look they’re on fire (hence the name), and whether you’re hiking, biking or driving a dune buggy, you’ll find it easy to understand why sci-fi movie makers come here whenever they want to set a scene on Mars.
Mount Charleston
With a highest peak of more than 3600 metres, Mount Charleston Wilderness, part of the Spring Mountains, offers something you probably never dreamed of seeing in Nevada: snow.
Skiiing, sledding and snowshoe hikes are popular in winter, and guided tours are available all year round. Take an interpretive hike with a naturalist, join a science safari or even an art workshop.
More than 60 kilometres of trails provide some spectacular hiking among steep canyons and unique plant life.
With pine and junipers dominating the foothills, and wildlife that includes Rocky Mountain, this is the high country, a radically different landscape to Las Vegas and the Mojave Desert, and less than an hour from the Strip.
Grand Canyon
It’s the “one great sight which every American should see”, said Theodore Roosevelt on declaring the Grand Canyon a national monument in 1908. He surely wouldn’t have minded if some Australians saw it too.
The Colorado River has been carving its way through the Colorado Plateau for millions of years, exposing rocks 2 billion years old (give or take a month or two), to create what is one of the world’s most astonishing, mesmerising, all-round-amazing landscapes.
At 446 kilometres long, up to 29 kilometres wide and almost 2 kilometres deep, this is one mighty big hole in the ground. It is gobsmackingly awesome, and can be easily accessed in a daytrip via helicopter or aeroplane from Las Vegas.
Some tours offer purely aerial views of the canyon, others include river cruises, visits to Native American communities, picnics and limos, or a stroll on the Skywalk – a glass, horseshoe-shaped bridge suspended more than a kilometre above the canyon’s riverbed.
