Arizona is full of surprises, The White Mountains sprawl across eastern Arizona, a land of rugged peaks, tall pines and lovely lakes. Other than the San Francisco Peaks, it is the highest mountain range in Arizona, with several peaks topping out at more than 11,000 feet.

Arizona casinos offer the chance to win and lose large amounts of money, but ours are different from the Vegas brethren. Arizona's are scattered around the state, rather than being concentrated on or near a strip and downtown.

The Arizona Strip remote wonderland is full of remote, backcountry beauty. No place, though, is quite as remote or difficult to reach, or, arguably, more beautiful than the Arizona Strip, a 5 million-acre swath of splendor between the Colorado River and the Utah line. Beautiful to look at but most people would not like to live there.

Kartchner Caverns State Park is 2-1/2 miles of nearly unrivaled wonders and as magnificent as that big hole in the ground north of Flagstaff. It's the Grand Canyon with a lid. The Petrified Forest National Park lets visitors to the vast park of 218,533 acres see the petrified remains of trees that grew here millions of years ago.

Monument Valley towers in the lore of movies as John Ford's favorite stage. And yet Monument Valley feels like the most foreign of places, even exotic - if such things still can be said about a large piece of our map. Many of us got our first glimpses of Arizona in movies made here.