New trails are popping up all over Texas.

They are tourists trails, designed to make money, but also to honor the state's colorful history and salute its diverse wildlife.

One planned trail will celebrate the wind.

Appropriately enough, the trail will have its terminus on the high plains of Lubbock at the American Wind Power Center.

The route will cover parts of Texas and Oklahoma that tourists seldom see. Right now, the participating Oklahoma cities include Shattuck and Woodward, at the base of the Oklahoma Panhandle. They are remote towns, way off the beaten tourist paths.

Elk City and Norman are larger Oklahoma cities interested in being part of the 600-mile route, which is being called Power of the Wind Trail.

The Texas portion includes Plainview, Amarillo, Canyon and Lubbock.

"It was just a sort of group-type deal," said Coy Harris, executive director of the wind power center. "Several people from Oklahoma came to us to look around. They all have a few windmills at their places, and they wanted to see what we had.

"We got to talking about a trail, similar to the plains trail or the bird trail, only on a smaller scale."

The Panhandle Plains Trail and the Texas Birding Trail are sponsored by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.

Harris and his Oklahoma counterparts envisioned a similar pathway linking several cities. The common denominator: the wind that blows incessantly across the Texas and Oklahoma plains.

"All of these towns have a small group of windmills or wind turbines," Harris said. "The goal is to get a few more people out in this part of the country to look at what made development possible out here."

Harris said the plains areas have plenty of water underground but very little on the surface. "The only way to get water out here was to pump it. The windmill was the only way to live out here," he said.

The trail will take a circuitous route exceeding 600 miles, but John Armour of the Lubbock Convention and Visitors Bureau said the typical sightseer will probably not complete the route.

"We're not expecting thousands of people to flood Lubbock and follow the trail," he told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. He suggested that tourists might stop in one or more cities.

"Then maybe they'll stop in Lubbock, stay the night, eat in the restaurants," he said.

Every city involved in the project has contributed or committed money toward producing a map, a compact disc, a Web site and additional advertising.

"We're going to go ahead and do it," Harris said. "We've already started drawing up the maps. The cities have begun to get their windmills cleaned up and oiled. We hope to be going by the first of the summer."

The wind power center is clearly the most advanced destination along the route. The windmill museum hosts 12,000 visitors a year, Harris said, "and we are still relatively new."

Harris said the center has a 30,000-square-foot building filled with antique windmills. The surrounding 28 acres display 40 outdoor windmills.

"This is quite a fascinating place," he said. "You can see the outside windmills working. You can hear them. We preserve them and display them."

Armour told the Lubbock newspaper that each trail city will distribute trail promotional materials through its convention and visitors bureau. State tourism agencies in Texas and Oklahoma will promote the trail with materials at their welcome centers. Maps and CDs will be distributed on racks in hotels and motels in Lubbock, Amarillo and Oklahoma City.