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A road trip can be like a good book. Each stretch of blacktop is like a skillfully developed plot line. Each curve holds the promise of fresh drama. All of which makes a multiday drive around the Four Corners region something like the great American novel of road trips.

Greatness, however, doesn't have to be expensive. Yes, gas prices are surging. Yes, family budgets are being pinched along with the economy. A recent survey by the Travel Industry Association found that two-thirds of travellers were cutting back on vacation spending because of “financial concerns.” But the American Southwest is one of the cheapest areas on the continent to tour by car.

In fact, if you can resist the Navajo rugs, there isn't all that much to spend money on here. Food and accommodations are relatively inexpensive. An $80 pass gives you a year's access to all federal recreation sites. The price for a week of gas, food and lodging: less than $2,000 – a road trip bargain.

And what a return on your investment.

Awesome slickrock canyons and red and pastel spires, fins and buttes abound at the junction of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona.

Here, too, is the largest collection of prehistoric ruins in the world: thousands of cliff dwellings built – and abandoned – hundreds of years before Columbus arrived in the New World.

THE SEARCHERS

I was no stranger to the Southwest when my wife and I turned our rented car north from Albuquerque, N.M. In the past 20 years, I have visited the region a half-dozen times.

But like many of my generation, I first got a taste of the place at the movies. Saturday matinees at the Plaza Theatre in Calgary were a ritual rarely missed in my grade-school days and the marquee was always the same: cartoons, a Three Stooges short and a horse opera.

But if the credits of westerns such as The Searchers and Warlock belonged to the likes of John Wayne, the big names were often upstaged by the scenery. The vast, high-desert expanses were perfect showcases for new marvels such as CinemaScope – technology directors such as John Ford used to turn the region into the most recognizable landscape in the world.

The attraction of the American Southwest has never been just skin-deep. It became a stage for dramas about the clash of the old and new worlds, the conflict between men in search of freedom and those establishing the rule of law. And, as movies such as last year's 3:10 to Yuma suggested, about the cost of greed and individualism.

Of course, long before cowboys roamed the stark plains and mountain ranges here, the Anasazi – ancestral Pueblo Indians – built a sophisticated civilization. This landscape may have served as sets for the big screen, but you'll also find remnants from dramas as old as the rocks.

THE ANASAZI'S MANHATTAN

Just south of the dusty town of Nageezi, N.M., a punishing 30-kilometre dirt road leads to Chaco Culture National Historic Park in a narrow, dry canyon framed by red-rock mesas.

It's hard to imagine that this harsh, wind-blown place was once the Anasazi's version of Manhattan. But 1,000 years ago – without the wheel or beasts of burden – Chacoan builders quarried and dressed tonnes of stone and hauled hundreds of thousands of logs from distant forests to build four- and five-storey structures. And until the 19th century they remained among the largest buildings on the continent north of Mexico.

From the ninth to 12th centuries, in fact, Chaco supported a peak population of about 4,000 in the canyon proper and 20,000 more in outlying villages. Corn, squash and beans were cultivated and irrigated, and there was a lively trade in turquoise, pots and intricate baskets along routes that extended to central Mexico.

Chacoans also accurately charted the seasons, built more than 640 kilometres of engineered roads to about 75 outlying communities, and created exquisite art. By 1000 AD, the community was well on its way to becoming the economic and cultural centre of the 65,000-square-kilometre San Juan River Basin.

But barely two centuries later, the canyon was virtually abandoned, its vast buildings silent and entombed by drifting sands. Like many of the great Mayan city states far to the south, Chacoan civilization most likely fell prey to a combination of overpopulation and climate change. Or perhaps it was as simple as a creative culture overstepping long-term environmental limits to survival and growth.

Whatever the reason, the Chacoans abandoned their canyon and blended – as did other Anasazi populations in the Four Corners area – into Pueblo Indian communities. What remains are thousands of stone relics dotting the landscape. Including our next stop: the dramatic ruins of Mesa Verde in Colorado.

THE HEART OF FOUR CORNERS

Thirty minutes east of Cortez, the two-lane road to Mesa Verde National Park begins a steep 20-kilometre climb along a switchback route to an elevation of more than 2,440 metres. Lookouts along the route provide stunning views that reach for kilometres in every direction over the heart of the Four Corners region.

Here, too, in the finger-like canyons on the south slope of the mesa, ancestral Pueblo people thrived for more than 1,000 years. Their civilization reached its climax between 1100 and 1300, when they built most of the grand cliff dwellings – more than 600, in fact – visible today as part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The largest of these pueblos is Cliff Palace. It had more than 150 rooms and was home to about 100 people. While only a handful of the ruins can be visited on ranger-guided tours, most of the significant structures can be viewed from overlooks along roads that wind along the canyon rims.

It's easy to imagine the sound of children and women echoing between the rock walls, and smoke rising from the kivas as the men tended to cornfields on the mesa top or returned from hunting forays. Sadly, it's also easy to imagine the growing silence as decades of drought, failing soil and a hunted-out environment turned these cliff-side communities into ghost towns.

Mind you, unlike the more isolated Chaco Valley, Mesa Verde is easy to reach and draws more than 800,000 visitors a year, crowding the roads and overlooks and interfering with such daydreams. Recent years have even seen the opening of Far View Lodge, a three-star inn, within the park.

After a few hours then, we drove back out of the park and headed west into Utah, once again along near-empty two-lane blacktops into the heart of desert country.

‘THE FLOOR OF THE SKY'

The dusty town of Mexican Hat, named for a nearby rock formation that resembles a giant sombrero, is perched above the canyon carved out by the San Juan River.

To the north lie the rugged canyon lands of southeastern Utah; to the south the vast sprawl of red earth and stone on the 67,340-square-kilometre Navajo Nation – a reservation larger than the combined area of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island.

Willa Cather described the landscape of the region best in Death Comes for the Archbishop: “Everywhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.”

On a brilliant morning, we drove south from Mexican Hat on Highway 163 and in 30 minutes we were staring the great stone monoliths on Monument Valley rising from the horizon – and at a movie set.

This is where Forrest Gump stopped running and where Clint Eastwood climbed the spire of Castle Rock in The Eiger Sanction. John Ford also filmed seven movies here from 1939 to 1960, turning the valley into an icon for a romanticized West.

Monument Valley is on Navajo land and the entrance to the forest of buttes here is either by guided tour or via a 25-kilometre dirt loop road. We were content just to sit for a while watching light and shadow move across the great stone pillars before heading farther south.

AT HOME WITH SPIDER WOMAN

Just east of Chinle, twin walls of red sandstone emerge from the flat desert, climbing to the 305-metre red rock cliffs of Canyon de Chelly (pronounced de-shay), Monument Canyon and Canyon de Muerto.

Here, too, are scores of small Anasazi ruins tucked into alcoves above the valley floor. But they are overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the desert above them. And with the exception of a precipitous trail leading down to the White House Anasazi ruins, access to the canyon is restricted to Navajo-guided tours leaving the venerable Thunderbird Lodge.

Drives along both the north and south rims of the canyons, however, lead to overlooks with grand views of rock formations such as the twin 245-metre-tall pinnacles of Spider Rock.

Native creation mythology says the pinnacles are the home of Spider Woman, a holy person who taught the Navajo how to weave.

GAZING INTO THE ABYSS

The grand finale of our red-rock tour came, where else, in the Grand Canyon.

We arrived on the south rim just as the late-afternoon sun cast a warm glow over the walls of this 1.6-kilometre-deep chasm. Cloud shadows moved across multicoloured, striated walls made from five million years of deposit and erosion. And here and there we could glimpse the Colorado River, a silver thread still carving its way deeper into the earth.

No statistics or photographs can prepare you for the sheer vastness of this natural spectacle. It's little wonder that more than four million people arrive each year to gaze into the abyss.

And the next day, even the impressive red rocks of Sedona, south of Flagstaff, were little more than a frothy dessert after the visual feast of the Grand Canyon.

It had been a trip that once again brought back to life the old Hollywood dreams for prices more in tune with old matinee tickets. But any trip through the Southwest is also about time – specifically its passing. Everywhere the rock spires and canyons are like geological yardsticks measuring elapsed eons.

The Anasazi ruins, too, are about the fragility of civilizations. As we reached the ungainly sprawl of Phoenix's suburbs, the chaos of its rush-hour traffic and the haze of smog above the desert, I thought maybe those ancient Pueblo people weren't the only ones who lost touch with the natural world.