The Forrest Fenn treasure hunt is back on, and if you want to find the loot, you’re going to have to binge-watch Netflix.

That’s the big takeaway from Netflix鈥檚 three-part docuseries Gold & Greed: The Hunt for Fenn’s Treasure,听which went live on Thursday, March 27. The series chronicles the decade-long hunt to find the chest that Fenn buried in the western United States鈥攁nd the lives of the people who became swept up in the frenzy to find it. Over the three 50-minute episodes, the series dives into the good, the bad, and the ugly moments of the Fenn hunt, including the that occurred during it.

(Spoilers ahead)听But the series’ headline-grabbing moment comes in Gold & Greed’s final few minutes. One of the treasure hunters profiled in the series, a software engineer named Justin Posey, reveals that he purchased some of the 476 items from the Fenn treasure after it went up for auction in 2022. And now, he’s put the goodies鈥攁long with additional gold, rubies, and even a meteorite鈥攊n a chest and buried it somewhere out there. To find the trove, you must decipher clues that are hidden in the three-part series.

“I managed to sneak in some hints during the filming of this series鈥攏o one knows what the hints are besides me, not even the producers,” Posey says in the series’ final scene. “So it’s worth your time to watch and listen closely.”

To be honest, the revelation helps explain some of Posey’s curious quirks throughout the docuseries. He drives a truck that’s wrapped in a topographic map, he sits for interviews in front of computer screens showing mountains, creeks, and lakes, and he lives in a house filled with strange artifacts from his own collection.

“Most of my family and friends would categorize me as eccentric,” Posey says in episode one.

So yeah, anyone who wants to find Fenn’s鈥攅r Posey’s鈥攖reasure is going to have to watch Gold & Greed again and again, until they have committed the entire program to memory.

I suppose that’s one way to market a documentary film.

滨蝉听Gold & Greed Worth Watching?

You bet. Aside from serving as a launchpad for Posey’s new treasure hunt, Gold & Greed does an adequate job of capturing the fervor (or, dare I say, psychosis) that prompted thousands of people to tromp into the wilderness searching for Fenn’s riches. 国产吃瓜黑料 covered the Fenn treasure hunt between 2015 and 2023 with a series of longform features, news stories, analytical stories, and podcast episodes. But for anyone who isn’t familiar with the ordeal, Gold & Greed听serves as an ideal explainer.

The opening episode devotes substantial time to profiling Fenn, the retired pilot and art dealer from Santa Fe, New Mexico, and to understanding why he launched the hunt back in 2010.

Fenn, who died in 2020 at age 90, famously kicked off the hunt with a poem he included in his memoir, titled听Thrill of the Chase.听The poem included extremely vague clues (Begin it where warm waters halt, and take it in the canyon down, not far, but too far to walk, put in below the home of Brown) about the location of the treasure, and these confusing directions were open to extreme interpretation.

Gold & Greed strongest contribution to the trove of Forrest Fenn coverage is showing how people become convinced that their interpretation of the poem is the right one.

One group, a family of self-proclaimed Wyoming rednecks named the Hurst family, believes that clues describe topography in the backwoods near their trailer. Over the course of a decade, the Hursts embark on one Sisyphean mission after another, and at one point spend two years attempting to excavate a massive boulder because they think the treasure chest is underneath it.

Another hunter, a California airline pilot named Lou Boyer, goes on one extreme Internet deep-dive after another until he’s convinced that the treasure is buried on a swath of private property along the Colorado-New Mexico border. Boyer takes his family on various vacations to the area, but is repeatedly thwarted by closed gates, flat tires, and other calamities.

Cynthia Meachum, a retiree, believes the key to finding the treasure is building a personal relationship with Fenn himself, and over the years she soaks up clues from Fenn that convince her it’s buried in Yellowstone National Park.

And then there’s Posey, who approaches the hunt with an analytical fanaticism that is equally impressive and concerning. He builds his own facial recognition software to analyze Fenn’s television interviews, hoping to decipher clues from the 85-year-old man’s mannerisms. He also trains his dog to sniff out buried gold and bronze.

Like Meachum, Posey becomes convinced that the treasure is somewhere in Yellowstone, and during one trip he searches the exact area where the box was eventually discovered in 2020 by a medical student named Jack Steuf.

As I watched听Gold & Greed,听I often thought about my teenaged fascination with playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon while watching听The Wizard of Oz听and watching the music create a perfect soundtrack for the film. It took me years to realize that this dynamic was simply caused by my brain instinctively making connections between the film and the album. Well, that and the pot smoke.

This psychological quirk, likely the remnant of some evolutionary trait, adds fuel to the hunters searching for Fenn’s treasure. They see patterns everywhere, and don’t require a bong rip to drop what they’re doing and hike off into the woods.听But there are also very human dynamics propelling them. 听Posey’s brother, who also hunts the treasure, dies by suicide, and the tragedy convinces Posey that he must locate it. The Hurst family seeks the gold as a way to escape poverty and provide a better life for their disabled sister.

And all of the groups admit that the spirit of outdoor adventure is also driving them to walk into the backcountry searching for gold. Despite the rather unseemly elements of the Fenn hunt鈥攎ore than a few weirdos stalked Fenn and his family, and one even broke into his house鈥�Gold & Greed argues that this spirit of outdoor exploration made the ordeal worth it. Whether or not you believe this conclusion is entirely up to you.

What Gold & Greed鈥檚 Director Has to Say

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing听Gold & Greed’s听director and executive producer, Jared McGilliard, who gave me the backstory on how the film came together.

OUTSIDE: Did you have any misgivings about having the documentary also serve as the launchpad for Justin Posey’s new treasure hunt?

McGilliard: Justin announcing that he’s hid a treasure in this series might be the first page of his new treasure hunt, but in my mind, it’s also the final page of his story searching for Forrest Fenn’s treasure. My focus was telling Justin’s story intimately and truthfully from beginning to end. To not include his new treasure hunt at the end of this series would have been not fully embracing the true arc of his story…and the impact Forrest and his treasure had on Justin’s life.

You chose four different groups of Fenn hunters to profile. What led you to each one?

The common ingredient was that they were all deeply obsessed. They had searched for years, and they all had highs and lows within their experiences. With all of them, they had this first chapter where they go out there, and over time they get deeper into it, and the hunt takes on more meaning鈥�I’m going to solve the poem.听I didn’t want to tell surface-level stories, I wanted to find stories where there were stakes and high ranges of emotion. Tragedy, beauty, adventure. I was also looking for a broad range of socioeconomic points of view, so I could show what finding the treasure really meant to them. And finally I wanted people with different strategies. Since this is Netflix it has to be a fun ride. You want the audience to grasp onto different subjects and root for them.

What did you learn about the human condition from following these groups?

One thing that’s top of mind is that we all create our different versions of truth, and that trumps everything else. People had these ideas about the poem that oh, this can’t be just a coincidence, even though the poem is so vague that it could literally fit anywhere. I could walk out of my own backdoor and find connections in the woods behind my house. The wonderful thing is that people made these amazing memories, but letting go of the thing was nearly impossible.

I have to imagine that other filmmakers were chasing this project. How did you get it?

I would say relationships helped me. I spent a year creating deep relationships with these subjects. So, when the Fenn family got in touch with us, and I flew to Santa Fe, they wanted to know what about the story was important to me, and I could tell them. I can tell a story that is not disposable, and one that the general audience will understand. I have that level of trust and depth with the subjects, and I can handle the story with care. I know that when were pitching our film there were other companies pitching it too. But we had invested in these subjects.

What do you hope the audience learns from the film?

We often just think about the outcome: whether it’s a win or a loss. I got the treasure or I didn’t. But these people have so many wins and losses throughout their journey, and it brings them together. The Hurst family alone鈥攖he wife almost leaves the family because of this. They mortgage their house, and when they get to the end and don’t find the treasure, they say it saved their lives because it gave them purpose. Cynthia Meechum has no regrets. Each one of these people went out there, and none of them came back holding a box of treasure, but their lives were changed for the better. When I think about why Forrest did this, it was so people would dream and have adventures and find a new side of themselves.

The post Forrest Fenn鈥檚 Treasure Is Hidden Again. The Clues Are in a Netflix Documentary. appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Early on in his career, video game designer Jason Rohrer embarked on a strange quest. Instead of trying to make huge blockbusters like Halo or Grand Theft Auto, he produced games about what it means to be human. His work was an argument that video games could be about more than shooting robots and aliens. He wanted to make people laugh, love, and cry.

His game Passage is a five-minute meditation on the beauty of life and the inevitability of death and part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art. A Game for Someone was designed to only be played 2,000 years in the future and is currently buried somewhere in the Nevada desert.

鈥淗e created a nesting doll game that could not be completed in a single human lifetime called Inside a Star Filled Sky,鈥� Patrick Jagoda, a game designer and English professor at the University of Chicago told me. 鈥淗is games have been very, very high concept.鈥�

But now, Rohrer is taking his art from the digital space and into the real world with a treasure hunt based in New England. On Thursday, Rohrer launched the hunt, called Project Skydrop. The first person to solve his seemingly straightforward puzzle will find a gold statue and bounty of cryptocurrency. But given the ambition and scope of his previous work, most everyone familiar with his games鈥攊ncluding me鈥攊s wondering: What does Rohrer have up his sleeve this time?

The Details of the Hunt

Project Skydrop is like a treasure hunt from the future. Instead of a brittle, yellowed map or a cryptic poem guiding searchers, this hunt is largely digital. The treasure itself is a sculpture made of 10 oz of solid gold鈥攚orth about $23,000鈥攅ngraved with a Bitcoin wallet recovery phrase that unlocks a further crypto bounty: 50 percent of the pool of $20 entry fees to join the hunt. The sculpture isn鈥檛 buried, or even hidden. It鈥檚 just sitting out somewhere in the open in New England.

The clues? A combination of aerial photographs that start unhelpfully close to the treasure鈥攐ne foot off the ground鈥攁nd a circle on a map that starts out unhelpfully far away鈥攁 500-mile radius. Every day, the aerial photographs zoom out to provide more context about the treasure鈥檚 surroundings. Every day the circle shrinks鈥攄own to a one-foot diameter search area after three weeks.

鈥淚 know it’s not gonna be solvable on day one,鈥� Rohrer told me from his home in New Hampshire. 鈥淎nd I know it’s definitely going to be solvable on day 21.鈥�

鈥淒efinitely solvable鈥� is an attribute that few other treasure hunts have had over the years. Most have failed in one way or another.

Forrest Fenn鈥檚 million-dollar chest of gold took ten years to find, and five searchers died in pursuit. By the end of it, in 2020, Fenn was the subject of several lawsuits. Because of this chaos, the treasure鈥檚 finder did his best to remain anonymous, and to this day the general public doesn鈥檛 know exactly where the treasure was hidden. It鈥檚 a mess.

Twelve treasures were buried in major American cities for The Secret, a treasure hunt created by Byron Preiss in 1982, but so far only three have been found. Preiss died in 2005. That hunt was simply too hard.

Even the original armchair treasure hunt, Masquerade, from 1979, ended in scandal when it turned out that the finder had used inside information to locate the jewel-encrusted golden hare that people were looking for.

The legacy of modern treasure hunts, in other words, is controversy, scandal, and failure. They end badly. They look a lot like video games that needed a little more playtesting before being released.

鈥淭reasure hunts in the past haven’t really worked that well,鈥� Rohrer said. 鈥淭hey kind of fundamentally break.鈥�

Project Skydrop, then, is a game designer鈥檚 response to those failures. The shrinking-circle, closed-timeline design of the hunt keeps it from dragging on for decades. The final location of the treasure and the identity of the finder won鈥檛 be a mystery: in order to claim the Bitcoin, the finder is required to upload a video of themselves with the treasure when they find it.

Rohrer and his creative partner, Thomas Bailey, have also taken steps to make sure that no one gets hurt by another searcher.

鈥淟et’s say the treasurer’s worth a million dollars, right? It’s life-changing money. And as you come over the crest, you see someone a few feet closer to the treasure than you. What do you do? Do you start running? Do you start screaming? Do you start shooting? So we had to figure out a way to prevent that as best we could.鈥�

Averting Another Forrest Fenn Debacle

What they came up with is a clause in the entry agreement that searchers must 鈥渙btain the treasure peacefully,鈥� and in the hope of enforcing that rule Rohrer and Bailey fitted the area around the treasure with cameras鈥攍ike a bizarro, non-violent Hunger Games.

Those cameras upload to the Project Skydrop website in real time, so barring technical difficulties, anyone who pays the hunt鈥檚 entry fee can watch the treasure hunt unfold, including the moment someone finds and claims tens- or hundreds-of-thousands of dollars worth of treasure.

鈥淚f you think about that moment,鈥� Rohrer said, 鈥渁nd what that moment will feel like in the grand scope of all human experience, it’ll just be an incredible moment, right?鈥�

It will be quite the moment. But is it art? Is it very, very high concept?

鈥淚t is possible that he made a treasure hunt and that’s it, full stop,鈥� Patrick Jagoda told me. 鈥淏ut based on the 20-or-so games that he’s made in the past, I bet you there are layers of meaning to what this thing is.鈥�

Perhaps sending people out into the world in the pursuit of a solid gold sculpture is a statement on being a celebrated video game creator, but not a particularly well-compensated one. Perhaps it鈥檚 a commentary on our increasing dependence on screens and pictures and satellite imagery to navigate the natural world. Perhaps he just wants to make the real world feel a little bit more like a video game.

When I asked Rohrer directly if there was more going on here than meets the eye, he laughed because even if there was, he said he wouldn鈥檛 be telling me about it.

But then he told a long story about his most successful game, One Hour, One Life, in which players build a family and then a civilization over the course of generations and every hour of gameplay equals one human lifespan. One Hour, One Life incorporates a lot of the themes of his early games鈥攖he meaning of life and death, and听the way our actions today echo into the future.

As the creator of this game, however, he can see how people are playing it鈥攖he degree to which a digital life can take over a real one.

鈥淲hen the game first came out and I was looking at statistics, there were a number of players who played it ten hours a day, seven days a week for like 11 months,鈥� he said.

鈥淚’ve interacted with a number of members of this community and, you know, a lot of them are like 25 years old, living at their parents house, spending all day playing video games. And some of the interactions I’ve had have been pretty heartbreaking. It’s like, 鈥業 know that I’ll never have a family of my own. And the only way I get to feel like the joy of parenthood is through your game. Thank you, Jason.鈥�

鈥淚 feel like I want to make something that kind of lifts them up out of that and kind of energizes them or something鈥攇ets them out of their chair.鈥�

When Forrest Fenn launched his treasure hunt, he did it to get kids 鈥渙ut of the game room, off their texting machines and into the mountains,鈥� he said.

Fenn spent much of his life in the mountains. Rohrer has spent much of his life making video games. But they鈥檝e arrived at a similar place.

鈥淟ike yesterday I climbed to the top of a mountain with my wife and two younger children and our dog,” he said. “And we picked wild blueberries up at the top of the mountain. And it was a really hot day and once we got down to the bottom of the mountain we swam in these beautiful cascading, crystal clear waterfalls. That felt like living to me.鈥�

In other words, Rohrer is still exploring what it means to be human. He鈥檚 still trying to make people laugh, love, and cry. But as the creator and curator of all that screen time, it seems like he鈥檚 also now trying to atone for something.

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The world’s most interesting video game designer just hid a treasure in the woods. What’s he up to? Jason Rohrer has been pushing the limits of game design for 20 years, but his latest creation takes players into the forests of New England in search of a sculpture made of solid gold. The catch? He says there isn’t one. But people familiar with his past work aren’t so sure.

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One motivation for exploring a square each week, come rain or shine, was to make being out in nature part of my routine. I hoped that becoming connected with where I live, with its weather and seasons, would keep me attuned to the seedlings pushing through pavements, the migrating birds passing overhead, the provenance of the food I eat, and reveal some interesting new running routes too.

Taking just a few minutes every month to , which I鈥檇 done for the past three years, had certainly made me happier. Each time I returned to the tree I was surprised by how much nature had changed in the past few weeks. Fun, too, had been my year of full-moon forays, getting outdoors for a run, ride, walk or swim on every full moon, and also a year of enjoying coffee outside at least monthly. If hospital gardens help people to heal, if doctors now prescribe exercise in nature, then committing to fifty-two outdoor missions sounded like a sensible undertaking. By now the habit of heading out once a week with my camera and notebook felt comfortably established.

It was a flat, grey day beneath a flat, grey December sky. The river flowing through today鈥檚 square was flat and grey, rippling as the tide nurdled ever lower. My mood, however, was neither flat nor grey. I was looking forward to this one.

A few off-limit jetties jutted out into the current, infrastructure for pipelines and industry. A conveyor belt rumbled along one, filling a barge with gravel, but all else was quiet. This was, perhaps, a grid square that only a map nerd like me could derive pleasure from. More than half of it was blue on my map, but that was an incongruous representation of the muddy, intimidating industrial estuary spreading out before me. I didn鈥檛 dare swim out to explore it.

Behind me, the rest of the square was fenced off by a shooting range, an electricity substation filled with fizzing power lines, a cement factory, a slime-covered canal (featuring a sofa tipped into the water, whose lurid colour perfectly matched the algae), and a police firearms training centre complete with replica streets and life-size sections of planes and trains. This brought back fond memories of getting a day鈥檚 pay back when I was in the Territorial Army at university to don 鈥榗ivvy鈥� clothes and cheerfully lob half-bricks and milk bottles at massed ranks of policemen in riot gear. It was all fun and larks until they mounted their response charge at us鈥�

And so, in terms of my exploration, the square was effectively reduced to little more than the footpath along the embankment鈥檚 flood defences, plus whatever muddy 鈥榖each鈥� was revealed as the tide fell. That was fine by me as I鈥檇 studied the tide timetable and arrived a couple of hours before low tide, past a yard filled with ships鈥� anchors, ten-feet tall and tonnes galore. I was here to go mudlarking among the slimy green rocks, brown seaweed and thick grey mud of the foreshore.

A mudlark is someone who scavenges in river mud at low tide, looking for valuable items. It was a way of life in London during the 18th and 19th centuries, when mudlarks searched the Thames鈥� shore for anything of value. They earned little but enjoyed an unusual amount of independence for the period, plus they got to keep whatever they found or earned.

Lara Maiklem explores the ancient, murky, tidal foreshore of the Thames, whose ebbs and flows still churn objects to the surface that have been hidden and preserved in the mud for centuries. I had recently devoured her fabulous book (and enticing ), and was fascinated by the greedy prospect of finding treasure, Roman roofing, Tudor shoes, and messages in bottles.

I donned wellies and waterproof trousers, climbed up and over the graffiti-covered embankment wall, and dropped onto the foreshore to begin my search. Its lowest reaches were a lethal gloop of deep, sloppy, stinking mud. I settled for making my way along the line where rock and mud meet, slipping over mounds of bladderwrack, a brown seaweed studded with air bladders that help it to float upright and absorb nutrients when submerged.

At low tides, the exposed seaweed forms dense beds, which theoretically should provide shelter for all sorts of creatures. But I鈥檓 afraid I saw not a single living thing among it all. A few gulls bobbed on the river, and semi-feral ponies grazed on the embankment behind me. But the water was pretty grim.

Only a few pearly-white oyster shells gave any suggestion of life in the grey mud. Over the past 200 years, habitat loss, pollution and overfishing slashed the oyster population around the UK by 95 percent, though it is now on the increase again. Across the country, things are improving from the low point of 1957, when the Thames was declared biologically dead and the river was a foul-smelling drain. It is a travesty, however, that even today, not a single river in Britain is free from pollution.

I had fully intended to find priceless loot within minutes of beginning my mudlarking. Instead, I found a rusty chair frame and heaps of plastic, including a label saying 鈥楤AG IT AND BIN IT, DON鈥橳 FLUSH IT鈥�. I picked up a 1980s milk bottle with 鈥楶LEASE RETURN BOTTLE鈥� embossed on the glass. All interesting enough, but where was that jewel-encrusted sword when you needed it?

Truth be told, my patience began to wane within about twenty minutes, as I had known it would. This was actually one reason I鈥檇 decided to try mudlarking in the first place, to remind myself to slow down, to savour the process of searching, and not to be so hung up on productivity or getting things done.

So I persevered, picking my way among rusty pieces of metal, crisp packets and drinking straws. We used to throw away 4.7 billion plastic straws, 316 million plastic stirrers and 1.8 billion plastic-stemmed cotton buds each year. Those numbers plummeted once they were banned: proof of the immediate impact that quick, simple law changes can have.

I stood up straight to stretch my back and to watch a ship pass down the river, filled with the romanticism of imagining all the places for which it might be bound. Nineveh, perhaps? But my maritime musings have become more accurate, if less exotic, since I downloaded the Marine Radar app, which tells you about any ships you see.

So this was the Maltese cargo ship Celestine sliding down the estuary with a salt-caked smoke stack and a cargo of cars. Heading in the other direction, a Dutch trailing suction hopper dredger slurped up the same gloop I was searching through. Dredgers work like monstrous vacuum cleaners, sucking up sand, mud and gravel from the channel to store onboard and discharge later. I wondered what gems had unknowingly been dumped through its pipes.

I bent down again and kept looking. Now I found a metal fork, a white comb and the compulsory shopping trolley. How did they end up in the river?

A discarded condom, unopened, told its tale of a disappointed date lobbing it off a bridge on his unplanned lonely trudge home to an empty bed. A golf putter, green with slime, had me imagining a pitch and putt rage, a nice day out soured by a tantrum and the golf club arcing through the summer sky into the water.

What else did I find? A pair of red pebbles caught my eye. A smooth, tactile fragment of green bottle marked 鈥楢.A. & Co鈥�. Two symmetrical shards of tile. A fragment of porcelain decorated with blue and white lines, dots and circles.

That was about it.

But still, I was 99 percent certain that Christopher Columbus had dined off that very plate, munching corn on the cob as he set sail to discover Australia. One can always dream鈥�

Even though I found no verifiable bullion or antiques, I had enjoyed trying to imagine stories for all the mundane objects I collected and brought home that morning. All these banal discoveries were grist to the mill as I learnt how to be an enthusiastic amateur. I was like the young boy Calvin in the comic strip, digging up the garden with Hobbes, his pet tiger. Hobbes asks Calvin what he has found.

鈥楢 few dirty rocks, a weird root, and some disgusting grubs,鈥� answers Calvin from deep in his hole.
鈥極n your first try?鈥� asks Hobbes in delight.
鈥楾here鈥檚 treasure everywhere,鈥� exclaims Calvin.

This is an excerpt from Local: A Search for Nearby Nature and Wildness by Alastair Humphreys. Available from听 and all good bookshops in the U.S., as well as directly from the publisher at

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The听online auction of items from Forrest Fenn鈥檚 famed treasure chest closed on Tuesday. In total, the sale generated $1,307,946.

All 476 artifacts in the collection were sold, and a total of 1,643 people placed bids for a piece of the fortune, Heritage Auctions communications director Robert Wilonsky told 国产吃瓜黑料.

brought in the most cash, with the highest bidder taking it home for $55,200. The next highest price was for听a purportedly containing Fenn鈥檚 20,000-word autobiography, which went for $48,000. In his 2010 memoir The Thrill of the Chase, Fenn wrote that he included the autobiography 鈥渂ecause maybe the lucky finder would want to know a little about the foolish person who abandoned such an opulent cache.鈥�

The sale is yet another wrinkle in the saga sparked by Fenn in 2010, when the late art dealer hid the chest filled with gold and jewels somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. Obsessives searched far and wide in pursuit of the riches, with a 24-line poem as their only clue. One man served time in prison for at Yellowstone National Park. while looking for the cache.

The Dallas-based auction house acquired the bulk of the treasure from Tesouro Sagrado Holdings, LLC, which bought the chest from Michigan native Jack Stuef, the man who found Fenn鈥檚 treasure in 2020. A few of the items, including the chest and dragon bracelet, were kept by the proprietors of Tesouro Sagrado Holdings.

last month, Stuef said he no longer owns any of the treasure and has no financial interest in its sale.听听

鈥淎fter my identity was revealed almost two years ago, some fans of the treasure hunt reached out to tell me they hoped they could purchase an item from the treasure to commemorate their own adventures searching for it,鈥� Stuef wrote. 鈥淚鈥檓 happy that today those people finally have the opportunity to do so, with a large number of items from which to choose.鈥�

Fenn, who died in 2020 at age 90, admitted he never knew how much the treasure was actually worth. Nevertheless, news reports over the years have thrown around estimates of $1 million to $5 million.

This auction is not a definitive valuation of the treasure鈥攏ot all of the items in the chest were up for sale, after all鈥攂ut we now know that you can buy a decent chunk of Fenn鈥檚 curiosities for less than the asking price of听.

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In 2010, New Mexico author and art dealer Forrest Fenn hid a treasure chest in the Rocky Mountains, and for the next decade, scores of searchers turned their lives upside down in pursuit of gold. Now, owning some of Fenn鈥檚 storied jewels will only require cold, hard cash.

Last Friday, a Dallas-based auction house opened online bidding for 476 items found in the chest, including centuries-old gold jewelry, coins, and other artifacts collected by Fenn. Among the collection鈥檚 standouts are a 549-gram Alaskan gold placer, a 1928 Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle coin, and a Colombian gold pectoral from circa 200-600 A.D., according to a news release from .

The auctioneer acquired the items from Tesouro Sagrado Holdings, LLC, which bought the treasure chest from Michigan native听Jack Stuef, the man who found Fenn鈥檚 treasure in 2020. A recent batch of court documents shows that Fenn鈥檚 treasure was likely buried in Yellowstone National Park.听The chest, the dragon bracelet, and a few other items are not for sale, because the proprietors of Tesouro Sagrado Holdings have kept them. Bidding closes on December 12.

last week, Stuef said he no longer owns any of the treasure and has no financial interest in its future sale.

鈥淎fter my identity was revealed almost two years ago, some fans of the treasure hunt reached out to tell me they hoped they could purchase an item from the treasure to commemorate their own adventures searching for it,鈥� Stuef wrote. 鈥淚鈥檓 happy that today those people finally have the opportunity to do so, with a large number of items from which to choose.鈥�

Perhaps the most coveted object for Fenn devotees is . As of Tuesday afternoon, it was going for $13,000.

In his 2010 memoir The Thrill of the Chase, Fenn wrote that he included the autobiography 鈥渂ecause maybe the lucky finder would want to know a little about the foolish person who abandoned such an opulent cache.鈥� The printed text is so small, he wrote, that a magnifying glass is needed to read it.

With Fenn鈥檚 24-line poem as their only clue, treasure hunters dedicated their lives to scouring the Rocky Mountains. Some searchers blew through their savings and abandoned their careers. One man served time in prison after he was caught at Yellowstone National Park. during their obsessive searches.

Stuef, then a 32-year-old medical student, found the treasure on June 6, 2020. Three months later, Fenn died at age 90.

For some Internet sleuths, the chase never truly ended. To this day, conspiracy theories abound online about how the chest was discovered.

The post Forrest Fenn鈥檚 Treasure Is Up for Auction appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Forrest Fenn鈥檚 treasure could bring out the worst in people. Few know that better than journalist and former 国产吃瓜黑料 Podcast host Peter Frick-Wright, who first wrote about the late millionaire鈥檚 hidden chest鈥攁nd the obsessives who searched for it鈥攆or 国产吃瓜黑料 magazine in 2015.

That feature story, 鈥�On the Hunt for America鈥檚 Last Great Treasure,鈥� wasn鈥檛 the first article on the hunt, but it seemed to set off a domino effect of reporting on the mystery, with lengthy deep-dives from , , , and , as well as a Cavalry Media podcast released in June, . Considering all the ink spilled over the sometimes-deadly hunt, one would be forgiven for wondering if there鈥檚 anything more to say about the eccentric art collector鈥檚 decade-long cat-and-mouse game.

But Frick-Wright鈥檚 new Apple Original podcast offers an intimate look at the chase and its human cost that only years of dedication to a story can provide鈥攖he sort of single-minded preoccupation that Fenn鈥檚 strongest devotees possess. The nine episodes follow the main subject of Frick-Wright鈥檚 2015 story, ex-police officer and treasure hunter Darrell Seyler, who became homeless while attempting to crack the code to Fenn鈥檚 hidden fortune. Frick-Wright spent eight years reporting on the hunt for the treasure鈥攊ncluding conversations with Fenn himself鈥攁ll culminating in Missed Fortune, which has so far released five episodes since it premiered on August 15. (国产吃瓜黑料 is one of the producers of the series.)

For the uninitiated: the hunt began in 2010 when Fenn, a wealthy art dealer in New Mexico, hid a chest filled with gold and jewels somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, with only a 24-line poem hinting at its whereabouts. In pursuit of these riches, searchers depleted their life savings, tanked their marriages, and served prison time. Five people鈥檚 quests . The treasure was finally found by Jack Stuef, then a 32-year-old medical student, on June 6, 2020. Fenn died two months later, on September 7, 2020, at age 90. Conspiracy theories continue to proliferate online about just what really happened with the chest鈥檚 discovery, and a lawsuit accusing Fenn of moving the treasure is ongoing. Its plaintiff, Jamie McCracken, claims he has evidence that Fenn was still alive after his death was announced.

You don鈥檛 have to know any of this background on the treasure hunt to listen to Missed Fortune. The series lays it all out while illustrating how Fenn鈥檚 game became much bigger than him, and why so many people would risk everything they had just to solve a riddle.

While the actual pile of gems was surely enticing, for a lot of hunters, it wasn鈥檛 about the money鈥攁fter all, Fenn had previously admitted not knowing how much the treasure was worth, despite estimates of $1 million to $5 million floating around in news reports. What Frick-Wright found, through his hours of conversations with Seyler, was that the hunt stood in for a set of intangible valuables鈥斺�渂elonging, purpose, accomplishment.鈥�

鈥淭hat stuff is water in the desert for Darrell鈥攖he pain and disappointment it brings, just drops in the ocean,鈥� Frick-Wright says in the fourth episode. 鈥淪o, there just won鈥檛 be any quitting. Not really. For Darrell, the only way out of this hunt is through it.鈥�

Of course, someone else found the treasure before Seyler, who was by that time 鈥渏ust another risk-tolerant treasure hunter, a face in the crowd,鈥� as Frick-Wright describes him. Now for Seyler and other former Fenn treasure hunters, the hunt is over, which is probably for the best.

The post A New Podcast Shows the Dark Side of Forrest Fenn鈥檚 Treasure Hunt appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

As she has for eight years, this search season,听听headed听into the woods of Yellowstone National Park to look for the place Santa Fe art dealer听Forrest Fenn hid a bronze chest full of gold and jewels over a decade ago. The thing is, by most accounts, the treasure is gone.

鈥淲e had such a trust with each other that we could talk about anything,鈥� Meachum said of her friend, . But for as much time she spent with him, and as much as she knows about the eccentric Fenn, she doesn鈥檛 know the place he loved so much that it was where he hid his famous stash. While her chances at fame and fortune are gone, the opportunity to learn more about her late friend keeps Meachum venturing into the woods.

On June 6, 2020, Fenn announced his famed chest had been found听by 鈥渁 guy from out east,鈥� who solved a poem in his memoir, Thrill of the Chase, full of clues to locate it. Most media outlets declared the million-dollar hunt over. A 听from听people who claimed that they were the rightful owners of the treasures followed. Facing the possibility he鈥檇 be outed in court, the听real finder, Jack Stuef, a 32-year-old med student from Michigan, opted to come forward via an 国产吃瓜黑料听article, though he would not reveal the exact location where he dug up the chest鈥攐nly that it was retrieved in Wyoming. With no treasure to find and the winner finally revealed, the vast majority of people once interested in the decade-long story simply stopped caring. What’s a treasure hunt without its treasure?

But a core group of devoted hunters kept searching for the spot the treasure was once buried. Whether driven by a personal connection to Fenn, a desire for closure, or the pure excitement of trying to decipher the poem and explore the woods with their friends, for many searchers, Stuef鈥檚 refusal to say where and how he found the chest means the hunt continues.

And the听internet sleuths dig deep. Fenn , , and are still flooded with solves based on emails Stuef sent about search techniques that worked for him. On Reddit, one hunter of more than 300 email conversations between searchers and Stuef, which grows every day. Another online sleuth built an algorithm that searched the most popular Fenn-based YouTube shows to see if anyone named 鈥淛ack鈥� had been mentioned before Stuef鈥檚 name was revealed to the public. Using this method, he discovered Stuef had called into and emailed the YouTube show 鈥淎 Gypsy鈥檚 Kiss鈥� under the pseudonym Jack from Philadelphia, which provided even more material to comb through.

Mike and Kristy Cowling, a married couple who run two Fenn-themed YouTube shows and (THOR), a popular Fenn message board, say traffic is higher than it鈥檚 ever been. When asked whether the solution was worth more than the chest full of gold, Mike Cowling said, 鈥淚 can鈥檛 say it鈥檚 more valuable, but I know there are searchers who would pay just as much for the solution.鈥�

While some stick to internet clues, others believe boots-on-the-ground searching is a necessary part of finding the spot. and in subsequent emails, Stuef explained that Fenn鈥檚 original blaze (the final clue marker meant to alert searches that they had found the exact location) had been damaged by a sudden, natural event, which made it hard for him to recognize. Plus, he mentioned, someone created a fake blaze to throw off searchers around 1,000 feet away from the real one.

Clues like these led Meachum and her search partner, a 38-year-old software engineer named Justin Posey, on their annual trip to northwest Wyoming. As they follow trails and wander through the woods, they look for three tangible signs of the treasure鈥檚 former location: Fenn鈥檚 blaze, a fake blaze, and a divot. But the pair has one special advantage on their side. After reading about ore dogs that helped miners sniff out zinc, copper, and nickel, Posey got an idea. He trained his dog, Tucker, to smell out bronze in search of the treasure. And now, as they search for a divot instead of a chest, he鈥檚 relying on Tucker to sniff the soil for any lingering scent.

The abrupt ending to the treasure hunt, and the fact that it came just before Fenn鈥檚 death, has led听some to believe that their time would be better spent investigating Stuef鈥檚 story than where Fenn hid the treasure. Following a crowdsourced professional investigation into whether Stuef鈥檚听chest photos were digitally manipulated, Kristy Cowling published a poll on THOR asking if Stuef was the finder. Nearly 30 percent of respondents answered 鈥渘o鈥� or that Stuef was a 鈥減roxy.鈥�

One of the most popular conspiracy theories is that Stuef found the treasure on private property, somewhere tourists aren鈥檛 allowed to go, or in Yellowstone National Park, and can鈥檛 admit it lest he open himself up to听legal questions around who the treasure really belongs to.

The other theory that鈥檚 gained the most traction is that Fenn sensed his life was coming to an end, but he didn鈥檛 want to burden his family with the hunt, which had stirred up听lawsuits, fatal accidents, and even a . So, goes the theory, Fenn opted to end the hunt by hiring Stuef,听a former journalist with bylines in Buzzfeed, New York Magazine, and The Onion, and tipping him off to the treasure鈥檚 location.

In March 2021, Greg Alan, an inventor and Fenn YouTuber who runs the YouTube channel 鈥淭reasure Seekers, Brutal Truth,鈥� conducted an in-person investigation to discover whether the Santa Fe office Stuef and Fenn said they鈥檇 met in was in fact a legitimate office in Santa Fe. Some people believe the photos of Stuef and Fenn were either Photoshopped听or took place in Wyoming. A week later, Alan appeared on the Cowlings鈥� YouTube show, 鈥淔orrest Fenn Treasure Found,鈥澨齮o outline his discoveries. , which confirmed that the Santa Fe office was a real office, quickly racked up 14,000 views.

Others, like David Woodard, a former law enforcement officer who creates videos under the name 鈥溾�� believe Stuef鈥檚 refusal to explain how he solved the poem stems from not having solved the poem. Woodard believes he followed and discovered Fenn鈥檚 blaze in New Mexico, but says he feared the professional ramifications if he was arrested for digging it up on public land. He believes Stuef was told the solve by people Woodard confided in about his own discovery, dug up the chest, and has been lying about it ever since.

As might be expected after years of examining a single poem for hidden messages, many conspiracies are based on a thorough investigation of the available texts. For example, Stuef鈥檚 email address to searchers, 鈥渏ack85319834@gmail.com鈥� anagrams to 鈥淛ack hid cache鈥� using a basic A=1, B=2 code. Or that Fenn congratulated 鈥渢he finder,鈥� but never explicitly congratulated Stuef before he died. The nitpickiest of the nay-sayers will point to Fenn鈥檚 statement on dalneitzel.com, a now-closed Fenn-themed blog, that read 鈥渢he finder understands how important some closure is for many searchers, so today [July 22] he agreed that we should reveal that the treasure was found in Wyoming.鈥� The statement, they say, reads that Fenn said he and Stuef agreed to say it was in Wyoming, not that it actually was.

Online conspiracies like Pizzagate and QAnon have gone from message boards to armed men storming pizza shops and government buildings, so there鈥檚 a very real fear a searcher might go too far. Kristy Cowling said she鈥檚 had to take down personal information about Stuef and his family from her website. She views her YouTube channel and message board as a method to keep searchers and conspiracy theorists in places that are more positive and closely monitored and moderated than others. Still, she said Stuef told her that he鈥檇 have to look over his shoulder for the rest of his life.

Knowing the treasure hunting community well, she agrees 鈥渉e absolutely will.鈥�

If Stuef won鈥檛 reveal where he found the treasure, will the hunt听ever end? Kristy Cowling believes at least ten people鈥攍awyers and family members鈥攌now the location, so it will come out eventually. But whether motivated by new clues, a personal relationship with Fenn, or the community itself, the searchers who still care aren鈥檛 likely to stop looking anytime soon.

鈥淭here are people who have devoted the last ten years of their lives to this thing,鈥� Mike Cowling said, 鈥渁nd they鈥檙e not going to just let it go.鈥�

The post The People Still Searching for Forrest Fenn鈥檚 Treasure appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

On May 4, 2020, with the pandemic turning his life upside down, 13-year-old Sebastian Morris needed a break. Bright and amiable, with long brown hair and wraparound shades, Sebastian lived in Santa Rosa Beach and enjoyed the usual Florida-boy fare鈥攕wimming, snorkeling, and hanging with his buddies, who nicknamed themselves the Tribe.

That morning, as Sebastian watched the rippling waves coming in at 鈥攎ore than 1,200 acres of shorefront听and dunes just east of the town of Panama City Beach鈥攈e couldn鈥檛 wait to go diving with his dad, Bobby, a blond-haired 46-year-old who was loading up a rented pontoon boat.

Bobby had parlayed his passion for diving into a career as a commercial diver and remote-operated-vehicle pilot. The work is adventurous and challenging鈥攈e鈥檇 done everything from searching for a sunken helicopter to cleaning up after the British Petroleum oil spill. It鈥檚 also dangerous. One time听while Bobby was torch-cutting an underwater structure damaged during Hurricane Katrina, he briefly got knocked unconscious by an explosion.

But what really captured Sebastian鈥檚 imagination were the treasures his father occasionally found on the job, including a 300-year-old ship he听discovered in 2019, deep in the Black Sea near Turkey. 鈥淚 was like, man, I kind of want to do that,鈥� Sebastian says.

鈥淎ll he鈥檚 ever wanted to be is a treasure hunter,鈥� Bobby confirms. As they set out into the Gulf of Mexico, Sebastian imagined all the amazing things they might find.

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For a decade, Forrest Fenn had lived as creator, promoter, steward, and defender of perhaps the most extraordinary treasure hunt America had ever known. He lived to see its conclusion. And then, barely three months after the hunt he had brought into the world had ended, Fenn was gone.

On the morning of September 7, 2020, Fenn was found unconscious in his study, having fallen, according to the police report. He was taken to Christus St. Vincent Regional Medical Center, then released to the care of his family, who returned him to his home. There , never having regained consciousness. The first responders who arrived on the scene that morning were initially responding to a cardiac-arrest call, indicating Fenn may have had a heart attack that precipitated his fall.

His funeral arrangements were private, and searchers were kept at arm鈥檚 length. The family did eventually post a message on Fenn鈥檚 website, thanking the search community: 鈥淭o the many searchers who joined us in the thrill of the chase over the last decade, your stories, emails, and tales of the hunt sparked joy in his life and we are forever grateful for your enthusiasm.鈥澨�

The author Doug Preston hadn鈥檛 been able to be there for Fenn鈥檚 90th听birthday in late August鈥攄ue to COVID-19, the Fenn family held a car parade for friends to drive by and say hello鈥攂ut Preston had called soon after听and found his friend well.

鈥淲hatever happened to him happened to him pretty quickly. I spoke to him ten days after his birthday, maybe a week,鈥� Preston said. 鈥淗e sounded great. He didn鈥檛 sound like he was in any kind of decline at all. Now, there may have been something going on that I didn鈥檛 know about. But his mind was there. He was cheerful. His vigor was still there, in terms of his intellectual capabilities. I did not notice any decline.鈥�

Preston said he could sense a sadness in his friend鈥攁 melancholy that the treasure hunt that had defined the final stage of his life had ended.

鈥淗e just seemed disappointed that the treasure had been found. A little bit disappointed.鈥�

After Fenn鈥檚 death, an outpouring of sadness, grief, and love came from the searcher community, with tributes to Fenn on all the prominent blogs and message boards. Many searchers told stories of their interactions with Fenn, or of what the hunt had meant to them, or just publicly thanked Fenn for what he had brought into their lives.

The hunt was over, and now its architect was gone. The anonymous finder was nowhere to be found, and while that left many鈥攎yself included鈥攚ith countless questions, I thought perhaps this might bring the story of this treasure hunt to a close, at last.

I should have known better.

On September 23, just over two weeks after Fenn died, on the website Medium, a self-publishing platform that allows users to distribute essays and other written works anonymously if they choose. Titled 鈥淎 Remembrance of Forrest Fenn,鈥� it was written by The Finder,听who described himself thusly: 鈥淭he author is the finder and owner of the Forrest Fenn treasure.鈥�

In 3,000 well-crafted words, the finder penned an ode to Fenn, who听he described as his friend.

鈥淚 am the person who found Forrest鈥檚 famed treasure,鈥� he wrote. 鈥淭he moment it happened was not the triumphant Hollywood ending some surely envisioned; it just felt like I had just survived something and was fortunate to come out the other end.鈥�

In his essay, the finder revealed a great deal about the circumstances under which he had found the treasure鈥攂ut crucially, he would not divulge exactly where he had located it, and said he did not plan to. He was also careful not to let any details about his own identity slip, indicating only that he was a millennial and had student loans to pay off. Beyond that, he was an enigma.

After finishing the essay, I no longer had any doubt that there was a finder.

Much else, though, remained unresolved. The finder had teased so many things in his essay, left me and everyone else wanting more. He鈥檇 said he鈥檇 answer more questions at some point, but I didn鈥檛 particularly want to wait, or leave what he answered up to him alone.

So I contacted him.

Medium doesn鈥檛 generally allow readers to contact the author of a piece directly, which is one reason it鈥檚 good for anonymous posting. It does allow users to post public comments on a piece, and more than 100 people quickly had, most of them supportive, some of them skeptical, a few of them angry and aggressive. But I wasn鈥檛 going to just post my email in the comments where anyone could read it; that left me no guarantee that the person I might end up in contact with would be the finder.

I had one trick up my sleeve, though. There鈥檚 a little-known way to send a direct message to the author of a Medium piece: You have to flag a section of text, indicating that it contains an error or a typo. That notifies the author of the piece that something needs to be corrected in his or her work. The system doesn鈥檛 give you a lot of space, just enough to describe the problem. So I flagged a section of the essay, barely squeezed in who I was and how to contact me via email, and hoped for the best. I had no guarantee that the finder would look at the message, or that he would understand exactly why he should get in touch. But it was worth a shot.

Less than a day later, an email popped into my inbox. It was from an address whose name referred to Fenn鈥檚 treasure. The finder had replied.

He鈥檇 heard of my project, he said, and he might be willing to talk to me. But he insisted that we鈥檇 have to keep things off the record for now. And so began a month of back-and-forth correspondence, sometimes several emails a day, culminating in my revealing his identity to the world in an 国产吃瓜黑料 article in early December 2020, identifying him as Jack Stuef, a 32-year-old medical student from Michigan.

Having written the 国产吃瓜黑料 article, my inbox was suddenly flooded with searchers claiming this or that about Stuef or that his solve was fraudulent, and asking me to prove it or use my knowledge to validate their own competing solves. I still had no idea where the treasure was, and I truly didn鈥檛 want to know, but that didn鈥檛 stop searchers from claiming that I was somehow involved in some of these conspiracies. I know we live in a post-truth world now, but even as conspiracies around the 2020 election dominated life outside the hunt, the level of disbelief I encountered within the chase still shocked me. Should I have been so surprised? Conspiracy theories have plagued this hunt from the start. I鈥檇 fallen for them myself.

Still, even if there were some details I couldn鈥檛 quite square, I remained sure that Stuef was the finder, and that no grand conspiracy was at play here. How could I be so certain? Part of it was confidence in the facts we all did know. Part of it was, as had said in his fateful, final sermon, understanding that at a certain point听鈥渨e have to trust.鈥� And part of it was that I had experienced something the other searchers had not. A few months earlier, I had flown to Santa Fe one last time听and opened Forrest Fenn鈥檚 treasure chest myself.

I tightened my mask as I stepped off the plane, out onto the tarmac at Santa Fe Regional Airport听and into the cool听air. This trip had come together quickly, out of nowhere, really. One day, back when I still didn鈥檛 know who the finder was, he鈥檇 sent me a particularly unexpected email, offering something I hadn鈥檛 really asked for听but had absolutely craved.

鈥淗ey,鈥� it read. 鈥淒o you want to come see the treasure?鈥�

I pounced on the offer and got to Santa Fe as fast as I could, thrilled at the chance to be so close to something I鈥檇 dreamt about for so long.

As I left my hotel the morning after flying in and made my way toward the finder鈥檚 lawyer鈥檚 offices, the streets of Santa Fe were barren, devoid of the traffic that normally choked Cerrillos Road. It was October, usually one of the busiest times of the year in Santa Fe. In normal years, October brings , featuring hundreds of hot-air balloons and a carnival atmosphere, and enthusiasts come from around the world to experience it. My trips to see Fenn and the other searchers in 2017 and 2018 had overlapped with the festival, and so I can attest both that it鈥檚 great, and that it jams Albuquerque and Santa Fe with tourists.

Not this year, I thought as I cruised down the near empty road, my face mask sitting on the console between the two front seats. But it wasn鈥檛 just the pandemic that made Santa Fe feel strangely empty. For me, Fenn鈥檚 absence loomed larger than the lack of tourists听or people driving to work.

This was the first time since learning of this hunt that I had come to Santa Fe for a reason other than to see Fenn; I still had much I wanted to ask him, and now I鈥檇 never get the chance. It was impossible not to think of him as I drove along, passing a restaurant in the Santa Fe Railyard where we鈥檇 had lunch, going by the turnoff to get to his gallery. The reality was that I couldn鈥檛 imagine Santa Fe without him. For better or worse, he and the city he called home had become synonymous in my mind.

It had been a month now since his death. His wife, Peggy, had herself passed the week before I arrived, living just four weeks beyond her husband. Peggy and Forrest Fenn had been married almost 67听years.

How would Fenn be remembered? He had been so concerned that his father had left no mark, that Marvin Fenn had no imprint on history until his son brought him back via his words and books. Forrest Fenn clearly would not suffer that same fate. His treasure hunt had made a greater impact than Fenn could have ever imagined. Still, his passing so soon after the end of the hunt鈥攁 hunt that I believe he鈥檇 hoped would outlive him鈥攄id end the story of Fenn鈥檚 life in the eyes of the outside world. His chapter in history was interesting, compelling, complicated, flawed. A moment in time, an amazing tale. But now over. Fenn had wanted to live on through his treasure hunt, through his chest. With the chest found, I don鈥檛 know if he鈥檒l truly do that.

The chest. Now that I was mere minutes away from actually holding it in my hands, I was brimming with anticipation, feeling that little tremble that comes from adrenaline coursing through my body. Was just seeing it as good as finding the treasure? Well, no, you鈥檙e a couple million dollars poorer, but in some ways, I don鈥檛 know, maybe it was better. A chance to experience and understand this treasure, without the burden of having to own it. At least that鈥檚 what I was telling myself.

What did I really know about it? It was small, deceptively so. Prominent searcher Cynthia Meachum had built a replica and placed it out in the wilderness to underscore how near impossible it would be to identify the chest at distance if you didn鈥檛 know precisely where it was. It was ten by ten by five inches, and that鈥檚 just not very big. And it was heavy. The chest itself weighed 20听pounds, the contents weighed 22听pounds, and Fenn had needed his famed two trips to get it all to his spot.

There had been a few attempts at chronicling what was in it鈥攕ome of the best work done by Cynthia鈥檚 pal Matt DeMoss. DeMoss鈥檚 efforts had been aided by the release of both sets of conference-room pictures, which I now understood had been taken at the finder鈥檚 lawyer鈥檚 office, the one I was about to visit. Nobody except for Fenn and the finder, however, had been able to really go through the chest, pull everything out, and document the contents鈥攗ntil now. The actual chest, I knew, was the bronze Romanesque lockbox, dating from roughly 1150, with carvings along its sides and top depicting the Castle of Love,听 where maidens sit atop the castle, and knights at the base try to scale it and reach them. It was not locked, but it did include a key, and it was latched with a gargoyle of some sort. There was some type of wood, perhaps oak, serving as a lining.

Based on what he believed to be in the chest, DeMoss had compared each item to similar examples currently on sale听and guessed the low-end sale value of all the items inside at $555,487, with the high-end sale value at $1,327,450. Even if we split the difference, chances are it would sell for more than that, because these items are part of the Fenn Treasure, a factor DeMoss said he did not incorporate into his analysis.

Included in his estimates were the 265 gold coins of varying types, the gold nuggets and dust, the golden frogs, the golden mirrors, the gold nose rings, the gold necklace鈥攇old, gold, gold. There was the ancient Tairona/Sinu necklace, the Chinese carved jade faces, the turquoise bracelet that Fenn had wanted to buy back, and Fenn鈥檚 20,000-word听autobiography, in addition to a few other, smaller items of note. Then there were the 鈥渆meralds, rubies, diamonds鈥� that were often mentioned as being in the chest. Were those merely included in what was perhaps the chest鈥檚 most impressive single item, the golden dragon bracelet, which itself contained hundreds of precious stones? Or were there additional jewels to be found beyond that? Nobody knew, except for Fenn, the finder, and whoever had been there when the chest was examined. There could still be curiosities waiting, surprises to be found, answers to be had. Now I was going to be privy to them.

I鈥檇 agreed to a few conditions when the finder had offered to let me view the chest. First, we鈥檇 agreed that I would pay his attorneys鈥� hourly rates for their time, such that my seeing the chest wouldn鈥檛 actually cost the finder money鈥攑retty standard journalistic practice. He鈥檇 also stipulated that he didn鈥檛 want me to identify his attorneys鈥攖here were three representing him, two men and a woman鈥攊n any meaningful way, so that they couldn鈥檛 be tracked down by overaggressive searchers. I agreed. And then one more: the finder wanted to make sure I didn鈥檛 open the vial containing Fenn鈥檚 autobiography, which remained sealed, and that if I could read any of what was inside through the glass, I wouldn鈥檛 relay any of that information. I agreed to that听as well.

The conditions weren鈥檛 onerous, and I was eager to make this happen. As far as I knew, examining the chest was not a privilege that had been extended to anyone else鈥攁nd in that, it was not lost on me that I was getting to do something that others might not like. I hadn鈥檛 searched for a few years now, and even if it hadn鈥檛 been found, I hadn鈥檛 planned on searching again. But still, there were people far more deserving than I who would have killed to see what I was about to see. Even if the finder managed to give the chest some sort of public exhibition at some point, I assumed no one would get to go through it, touch it, experience it the way I was about to. As I parked the car, I could feel a certain weight to what I was about to do, a responsibility to do it all right, whatever that meant. That, and maybe a few pangs of guilt, for getting to enjoy what other, better searchers couldn鈥檛.

I parked near the offices, put on my mask, and walked along the sunny, empty streets toward the front door. There were COVID-related signs posted about not entering without an appointment. I was pretty sure I had one of those鈥攖hough even at that late moment, there was still the tiniest sliver of doubt in my mind. At the time, I still didn鈥檛 know who the finder really was, and hence had flown out here on a tiny plane on the offer of someone whose name I didn鈥檛 know, based on a cold-call email and little more than that. I was pretty sure, as close to certain as I could be, that this was the finder and that everything was legit, but until I was actually opening that chest myself, nothing was truly guaranteed.

So it was heartening when I swung open the large, heavy door, went into what seemed to be an impressive professional suite of law offices, gave my name at the front desk, and waited only moments before the finder鈥檚 attorney came out and introduced herself.

鈥淲e鈥檒l just go right in here,鈥� she said, pointing to a set of doors leading into a conference room, 鈥渁nd then we鈥檒l bring the chest right in.鈥�

That simple, huh?

I pushed open the doors and entered a reasonably sized room with an oblong wooden conference table covered by glass. It was instantly familiar from the two sets of pictures posted to validate the find.

鈥淚s this where you showed Fenn the chest?鈥� I asked.

鈥淚t is,鈥� she replied. 鈥淗e sat right there.鈥� She indicated听a chair at one end of the table. 鈥淵ou can sit right where he sat if you want.鈥�

I wasn鈥檛 sure if that was a little too fanboyish. But it seemed like a good place to sit anyway, so I threw my backpack down near where she鈥檇 gestured. This was perhaps the only time on the hunt when I was absolutely, definitely, unquestionably following in Fenn鈥檚 footsteps, instead of puttering around in the wilderness two states away from where he鈥檇 left his treasure. Here听I was really and truly doing just what he had done, only a few months before, when he鈥檇 gone through this chest for the first time in a decade.

From the moment I鈥檇 entered this chase, the chest had been the goal. In some ways, it was a MacGuffin, like the Maltese Falcon听or the Death Star plans鈥攊t was what this chase was about, yes, but it wasn鈥檛 really what this chase was about, y鈥檏now? Still, it mattered. Up until this moment, the chest had been purely theoretical to me. I鈥檇 never expected to find it, so I wasn鈥檛 one of those searchers who had already spent the money in it ten times over. For me听it was more about figuring out the clues, getting the answer.

Yet now that I was going to be laying eyes on it, touching it, it moved from the realm of the theoretical to the actual in a hurry.

That understanding fundamentally altered my entire view of the chase. It meant that despite whatever else he鈥檇 done, Fenn had been telling the truth about this box and what was in it: that he had hidden it somewhere out there, and the finder really and truly had obtained it听and was now letting me see and touch it. That most basic set of facts was real, and that gave me a sense of certainty about this chase, of a kind I had never really had until now. Did that improve Fenn鈥檚 standing a bit in my mind? It was a complicated question. To this point, I鈥檇 managed somewhat to separate the man from the hunt, even though it was hard to do. And knowing that he was telling the truth did mean something for the man, somewhat. It didn鈥檛 mean he was without failings, his chase without its problems. But he had done this, just the way he鈥檇 said he had. And that, in my mind, counted for something.

I started to ask if they needed me to sign anything before we began, as I stretched on the latex gloves that I鈥檇 brought for the examination. Then, just like that, the conference-room door opened and a man walked in bearing a bronze box, ten by ten by five, worn and weathered and perfect. He hurried quickly over to my side of the table as I, in true surprise, stammered something out about not expecting it all to be quite so easy.

He chuckled in reply as he walked up and casually handed me Forrest Fenn鈥檚 treasure chest.

Excerpted from ,听by Daniel Barbarisi. Copyright 漏 2021 by Daniel Barbarisi. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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