During my fixed wing to rotor wing training the notion of being high to enable greater choice for forced landing areas was balanced off with the concept of not being needlessly high if something goes wrong - less time to get to the ground. If there are no good landing area choices anyway, then being lower is better, 'cause you're going down anyway! While ferrying an MD500 back near the Canadian arctic, I went up to 8000 feet for the spectacular mountain view. The [very experienced] rotorwing pilot I was flying with was really squeamish that high, and asked me to get back down close to the ground as soon as I'd had my look around!