Information on Travelling to the American Southwest

The American Southwest is unlike any other terrain on earth. Planning to visit in this area can be overwhelming. Use the following websites to refine your search and planning.

www.desertusa.com

Desert USA is a detailed and creative website about exploring the southwest. This website is awesome and will excite you about the area. It features a good search utility and a refreshingly different menu. Instead of searching by state or other usual terms, try the "things to do" page, where you'll find headings like "Off Road Exploring, Desert Caves and Caving, Horseback Riding, and Rock and Treasure Hunting" among others. Desert USA then gives you a listing of links organized by state of where to do them.

"Peoples & Cultures" brings you to a page brimming with goodies. Under the heading "Music Makers", you'll find an informative article by Jay W. Sharp that explores the role of music across time in the Southwest. For modern day Southwest music visit www.sansietch.webs.com.

Overall this site is great for beginners and advanced travelers. Less about specific places like national parks, and more about the people, the history, and things to see and do, it educates and often inspires more interest in this treasured region of our country.

www.americansouthwest.net

Another useful southwest website is American Southwest. A comprehensive guide to everything about the region, specifically concerning the national parks there, this site aims to familiarize visitors with the general interests of each place.

The website is categorized by state, including Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah. Within each state one can find most everything from national and state parks to monuments and other scenic places.

One drawback to this site is the end page for anything leads to fairly static information without many outward links.

www.gorp.away.com

Gorp is part of The Away Network, a cornucopia of information, especially concerning national parks. The site breaks down categorically into regions. The southwest region contains links to information on each of the 11 different national parks there.

You can, of course, search by other criteria such as state parks or a specific state or criteria such as wildlife refuges.

The main drawback to using this site is it wants you to register to get full access. This makes Gorp more for regular travelers than for infrequent visitors. Pages also load slowly and I wouldn't recommend the site to low bandwidth users. Registering does come with more advantages, however, such as free access to the award winning content of Outside magazine, GORP, and Away.com. Free access to the GORPtravel's adventure vacation database, featuring more than 2,000 trips in over 120 countries, and members only access to selected travel deals on airfare, hotel, gear, vacation packages.

For even more information regarding the American Southwest visit www.cyberwest.com, an ezine with great articles on everything western. Also, Bill Leverton's www.travelsw.com, filled with great links and articles. If you're looking for campgrounds and RV parks to stop at www.Southwestcampgrounds.com has over 1,100 listings. Finally, www.outwestnewspaper.com was a quarterly paper founded by traveler and reporter Chuck Woodbury. It has loads of stories from the road.