Traveling by car is the only way to get around if you live in sunny California. In 1969, I got to drive with my dad, his then-girlfriend, a willowy Native-American beauty named Felicia, our friends Bob and Toby Rafelson and their kids, Julie and Peter, to a seemingly faraway place called Taos, N.M. My father had discovered Taos during one of his many scouting trips for “Easy Rider,” which he had shot the year before.

My dad was 32. I was 6.

We had all piled into the Rafelsons’ maroon Pontiac station wagon with its prominent wood siding first thing that morning. My mother, Brooke Hayward, had purchased the identical car right when the Rafelsons bought theirs. Since she and my father had divorced after he made “Easy Rider,” she was absent when we departed. I was grateful to miss out on a complicated goodbye.

According to my dad, Taos was sacred. It was the land of American Indians and their mountains, their beautiful Pueblo and their blue lake, which was meant to be so spiritual you could land in Tibet if you bore a hole through the bottom of it. He also told me more than once that rattlesnakes refused to go to Taos because of its extraordinarily high altitude. They instinctively knew not to travel past Santa Fe.

As we drove, my father rattled off the names of adventurers who had populated the Taos landscape over the years — artists, writers and activists like D. H. Lawrence, Dorothy Brett, Mabel Dodge Luhan and Millicent Rogers, who had resided there since the 1920s. They didn’t seem like regular people but figures out of myth, characters who had bucked society to find their own way in their own world, forming a grand community of outsiders, together. Sounded good to me. No snakes — just artists, mountains and Native Americans.While Dennis’s stories floated through the car, Julie and Peter and I bunked in the back of the station wagon, covered in old quilts and Pendleton blankets. It was a time of no seatbelts, no five-point harnesses. Freedom.

Along the way, we stopped to buy moccasins and visit the Grand Canyon and the Canyon de Chelly and the Petrified Forest, where we were told not to take anything or we would go to jail. Even so, inspired by Dennis’s campfire car tales, I stuffed my pockets with small pieces of petrified wood. I was on a road trip. It was an adventure.

Back in the car, we looked out the windows over the course of the drive and watched the world change and fade into the colors of a desert moonscape with cactuses and red dirt and mountains in the distance. I had seen this horizon before, most probably on “Bonanza,” on which my father had been a guest star in 1964. When he finished working on the show, he would arrive home with arms filled with rubber cactuses and boulders — with which he extensively decorated the backyard of our house on 1712 North Crescent Heights in the Hollywood Hills. I loved those pieces, marveled at how much they looked like the real thing and delighted in being able to lift a huge boulder high above my head to throw at one of my brothers in a moment of childish frenzy.

Once we arrived in Taos, we stayed at the Kachina Lodge. Giant-size kachina dolls stood guard outside the hotel over the miniature versions housed inside. Some were adorned with feathers, others with tiny turquoise and silver jewelry. Julie and I found them all deeply enchanting. At this time, Taos was a wonderfully sleepy Southwestern town nestled at the foot of the beautiful Sacred Mountain. I was in awe of the particularly carved wooden pillars that were placed in front of many houses and buildings, and of the unique hand-painted beams inside them. The smell of burning firewood was ubiquitous, and carefully applied murals made one feel as though each home was a stand-alone one-of-a-kind.

A year later, in 1970, my father bought Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Taos house, Los Gallos, from her granddaughter, with all of Mabel’s original furnishings inside. He also rented the house Mabel had built for her husband, Tony Luhan, on land next door that belonged to the Taos Pueblo. Los Gallos was a place where (from the 1920s to the 1950s) Mabel had invited artists, dancers and writers like Martha Graham, Ansel Adams, Willa Cather and Marsden Hartley to participate in the artist colony she had created there. Mabel had great flair for mixing up pieces of furniture she had brought to Taos from her time living in Florence, with Navajo rugs and pottery as well as fine Venetian silks and Fortuny fabrics.

After he bought that house, my father decided to live in Taos and leave L.A. for good, and following in Mabel’s steps, to create a creative counterculture where his friends — artists, actors, musicians — could come and gather in the Mud Palace, as he liked to call it. Los Gallos had more than 10 bedrooms, a guesthouse and a carriage house — plenty of room to have friends come and cross-pollinate their ideas. He wanted to set up an editing room so he could work on “The Last Movie.” He also bought the old Taos movie theater, El Cortez, across from the Ranchos de Taos church, and used it to screen different cuts of the movie as he was finishing it.I returned to the Mabel Dodge Luhan house year after year — or whenever my mother would let me. When I was born, my dad had meandered through L.A. a classic Hollywood preppy, clad in T-shirts and khakis with his sneakers worn through at the toes, often covered in paint from the art he was making, camera slung around his neck. He was always proud to sport a new Brooks Brothers raincoat — even if it wasn’t raining. As the 1960s progressed, he headed for the Southwest and hippiedom, in terms of style. Lacoste shirts gave way to mandalas. He wrapped himself head to toe in denim, man bag invariably in tow. And then, as the ’70s set in, my father’s style began to incorporate touches of a deeply cool American maharaja.

Turquoise stones crowned his belt buckles and Stetsons, every surface bejeweled with royal abandon. He wore coats woven from Navajo blankets lined in sheepskin. One day he showed up at our house at 1712 with Michelle Phillips (before marrying her in Taos for eight days) on his way to the Academy Awards. They were dressed in matching velvet ensembles. By that time, my father, who had begun our first trip to New Mexico by telling stories about the wonderful characters in Taos who filled up the town, had become one of them, every bit as colorful as D. H. Lawrence or Millicent Rogers at the height of their power.

As the ’70s wore on, the vibe changed. The big bohemian party began to tilt off the rails. The Mud Palace artists’ colony, at one time inspiring and experimental, became unfamiliar. One morning Dennis went down to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee and found he didn’t know a single person in his kitchen. He fled and went to live in the Tony Luhan property next door. Once, I saw a pistol on the living room table. When I told my dad I was scared of guns, he told me, “Not to worry. I just used the gun to shoot my Andy Warhol ‘Mao’ painting. I fired a warning shot.”

Though in a manner of speaking he had been voted off his own island by a bunch of strangers, he refused to abandon his beloved Taos and kept going, marrying the extraordinarily beautiful dancer and actress Daria Halprin. They had my sister Ruthanna, and my dad opened a gallery called Dennis Hopper Works of Art, which he carefully curated. The openings were fantastic happenings with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Kris Kristofferson in attendance. One time, he had white T-shirts printed with turquoise squash blossoms around the collar to celebrate a new showing of an artist’s work. Friends I grew up with in Taos still have theirs — and wear them. But then, after my father and Daria divorced a few years later, he retreated into solitude. He withdrew from his family. He withdrew from himself.

The Mabel Dodge Luhan house was eventually sold, its furniture packed up piecemeal. Despite a brief but fabulously demented cameo in “Apocalypse Now,” Dad remained lost in Taos, until he resurfaced, years later, sober, as the oxygen-huffing madman Frank Booth in “Blue Velvet.”

He did eventually return to Taos, transforming the El Cortez theater into his home and art studio. He had the upstairs projection room made into his bedroom. A window in front of his bed looked directly out on his beloved Ranchos Church, the same church that Georgia O’Keeffe famously painted years before. He went there to paint and to see friends, many of whom, like Dean Stockwell, Larry Bell, Kenny Price and Ron Cooper, were artists he knew from the ’60s, who lived and had their studios there.

Ultimately, he chose to be buried in Taos. After an emotional ceremony near the Ranchos church, his coffin was lowered into the sacred ground as a band of Hell’s Angels lovingly gunned the engines of their motorcycles in a final tribute. And my father rode off into the sunset for good.