I came to Coronado National Memorial looking for a cave. Coronado’s Cave, which I had some idea was actually connected to the conquistador. Hadn’t they found some artifacts there? Movie scenes played in my head. Lost treasure. Indiana Jones, I suppose.

The docent scoffed.

“It’s just called Coronado’s Cave because it’s here in the park,” he said. And it’s just called Coronado Memorial because the would-be conquistador came through this way some 450 years ago, taking the grassy pass between the highlands. Nevertheless, the cave seemed like a worthwhile goal – I hadn’t been in a cave in years – and I wanted to see it.

“You can’t hike up there without signing a permit,” he said. I waited and he said nothing more, even turned away to other business.

“Can I sign a permit?”

“Do you have a flashlight?”

“No.”

“You can’t go up to the cave without a flashlight,” he said dismissively and turned away again.

I was a little disappointed and turned to leave, when I almost knocked over a rack of cheap plastic flashlights for sale behind me.

“So if I buy a flashlight and sign a permit, can I hike up to the cave?”

Apparently I’d puzzled him out, unearthed the information he was not going to share, and said the magic words. Soon I was on the trail, my new blue flashlight in one pocket and my permit in the other.

The ¾-mile hike was steep and, more unexpectedly, slippery, as if the dust beneath my feet had been polished by wind and sun. I had no reason to believe it was from a mass of hikers before me; there was no one anywhere in the park that I could see.

The trail led to roughly hewn steps that looked ancient in the empty landscape, like the remnant of a civilization long past remembering, and I climbed farther than I thought I would have to before I found the cave. A narrow mouth dropped down steeply over difficult boulders into darkness.

The trail brochure had warned that it was against regulations to enter the cave with only one light source, but I wasn’t about to hike back to the visitors center in defeat: I decided the glow from my cell phone would be enough to keep me out of national park court. I wished myself luck and descended – a smidgen daringly, I thought – into the unknown.

Except for the buzzing and invisible flies, it was as lifeless a cave as I have ever seen. Dry and dead as dust. It dog-legged back a few hundred yards, past a single and long dormant stalactite, to hit a wall onto which a thin trickle of daylight dropped. And that was about all there was to it.

On the way back to the visitors center I began to think of myself as a representative of Coronado himself, returning from a fruitless quest. He, of course, had been looking for legendary lost cities of gold; I don’t know what I had been looking for, but it became clear soon enough that the only reward for my endeavor was time spent. And I suspected that Coronado, like me, was not one of those philosophic sorts who believe the point of a journey is the journey itself.

I suppose I could have kept the blue plastic flashlight, but instead I gave it to the reluctant docent and told him to donate it to the next conquistador who happened through.